ambcrypto.com
The most awaited hard fork in the cryptocurrency community, Ethereum [ETH]’s Constantinople is finally set to take place in Q1 next year. The hard fork is going to occur at block 7080000 around January 16, 2019.
The announcement was made by key developers of the platform on their social media platform, including Peter Szilagi and Afri Schoedon. Szilagi said:
“#Ethereum Constantinople mainnet hard fork scheduled for block #7080000, estimated around the 16th of January, 2019!”
The announcement of the hard fork was initially made in the month of July 2017, during a developer and stakeholder meet, with their goal set on making the network more efficient and less expensive.
The hard fork proposes the implementation of five Ethereum improvement protocols [EIP]s. One of the well-known implementations is the reduction of the block mining reward issuance, from 3 ETH to 2 ETH and delaying the difficulty bomb for 12 months.
The upgrade will also be improving the efficiency of the network and performance. Additionally, the hard fork will also ensure that the network is faster and will be focusing on the optimization of the developers’ experience and decreasing the overall cost for developers.
Moreover, it was decided that the hard fork will take on the Ropsten Testnet first, following which it will be launched on the main chain succeeding Devcon 4. However, the Testnet had its own hurdles, with it being delayed first and then encountering several issues during the Ropsten Testnet.
According to Peter, the reason for the delay of the test net was a Denial of Service [DoS] attack that was encountered on the Ethereum Virtual Machine [EVM]. Whereas during the Testnet, the consensus bug was discovered in Parity. Lane Rettig, another core developer, stated that the confusion over the meaning of terms such as transaction and execution frame could have contributed to the bug.
There was also issues related to miners and the mechanism of Parity and Geth. In the post-mortem report, Rettig had stated that there was an issue with the availability of miners on Parity, Geth or Aleth for Ropsten Testnet.
He also added that Parity had a limit on how far back the nodes could automatically reorganize themselves, as the fork was too long for Parity Ethereum nodes, which was not the same case as Geth.