Upcoming Ethereum Forks in Jan 2019

There are a few Ethereum forks coming in 2019. These include the long planned Constantinople upgrade, ETH Classic Vision (ETCV), and Ethereum Nowa coming Jan 2019.

IMPORTANT: Recent reporting is claiming that both ETCV and ETN are scams that are stealing people’s ETH. Below I explain how to protect against this, but for now you should simply avoid both of these forks and focus on the legit Constantinople fork. When more forks are announced, we’ll cover each, but I’m going to leave the scam forks here so you can know what you are up against next time.

So first off, the only one of these that is a 100% confirmed as legit fork that you should care about is Constantinople.

This is the next expected upgrade to Ethereum as defined in the Ethereum roadmap, and it has the general consensus of the Ethereum community behind it.

Constantinople is not meant to produce “free coins” or a new chain, it is just a planned upgrade to take Ethereum one step closer to being its 2.0 future self.

Now, on top of this we have two dev teams apparently trying to cash in on the excitement.

• We have ETH Classic Vision (ETCV), who built a website, and plans to fork Jan 11.
• And we have Ethereum Nowa (ETN), who has a Twitter running, and plans to fork Jan 16.

To get the full scoop on all of this, see our page on Ethereum forks.

Don’t chase forks, they are usually cash grabs: 9 out of 10 times forks like Nowa and ETCV are cash grabs (speaking in terms of the history of forks). Forks like this are often pre-mined, and don’t trade on major exchanges, and launch in tandem with lots of malware wallets waiting to steel coins from confused users. It is almost never worth chasing forks like these. However, if you know what you are doing or if you carefully follow best practices, there really is no harm in taking a chance, controlling your private keys during these forks, and then moving your funds.

How to ensure you are in for the ETH forks: You can do something simple like move your ETH to a MyEtherWallet address where you control your private key for the forks, then move your funds out after the forks while retaining your private key, then when the new forked MainNet’s launch you would download the official wallet software from those forks and import your private key from the wallet you had your ETH on during the fork (after downloading the new blockchain).

Bottomline: Constantinople is a big deal, be excited! It is not about getting something for free, it is about taking the Ethereum network one step closer to glory. No need to move your coins or do anything fancy for that one unless you run your own node (in which case, update your software). For the other forks, don’t hold your breath, but if you want to take a chance, you now know how to do it.