Ethereum core developers plan to conduct the "Berlin" hard fork in mid-April

According to BlockBeats, on February 20, Ethereum core developers said at a meeting on Friday that Ethereum developers plan to conduct a Berlin hard fork at block height 12244000 on April 14.

The hard fork includes various optimizations to the contracts, including gas efficiency, updates to the way the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) reads code, and other changes to prevent denial of service (DDOS) attacks.

As previously reported, the Berlin hard fork was originally planned for June or July 2020, but was postponed, mainly due to issues surrounding the excessive centralization of the Geth client, on which most Ethereum nodes run.

The Berlin hard fork was preceded by multiple testnets. The update includes at least five Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) and will be released on four testnets before deployment.