Looming Constantinopole hard fork to keep ETH/USD under pressure

Ethereum developers team published Geth 1.8.20 on GitHub portal. It's a transitional software that will facilitate the adoption of the new chain after Constantinople hard fork scheduled on January 14-16, 2019. This release will be the final in the 1.8 series.

The developers have chosen the block number, where the fork would take place - 7,080,000. Until that time all versions of client applications with full node support shall be upgraded and released for download/ At least 95%of miners and operators must install the updated versions to avoid multiple hard forks that happened in testnet Ropsten.

Constantinople launched on this platform resulted in numerous forks and side-chains supported by miners that failed to upgrade the nodes.

Also, unwanted forks might happen in case of code vulnerability in one of the client applications.

Considering high risks and uncertainty, many traders prefer to take a wait-and-see approach until the updates are successfully deployed. The same applies to cryptocurrency exchanges that freeze transactions with forking cryptocurrency.

To that effect, ETH is likely to stay under selling pressure at least until the Constantinople is over.

Currently, ETH/USD is changing hands at $90.30, marginally higher since this time on Wednesday. While the coin has recovered from the Asian low at $88.48, the upside momentum remains weak, and the recovery is limited by $91.00 handle with SMA100 1-hour on approach.