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The Ethereum Foundation has decided to delay the scheduled Constantinople hard fork. The decision was taken by Ethereum developers after finding a security issue in one of the proposed upgrades. The smart contract audit company ChainSecurity was able to detect these vulnerabilities. An investigation is currently being undertaken.
Constantinople Hard Fork Postponed
In a recent blog post uploaded by Ethereum, they inform that they are investigating any potential vulnerabilities on the new proposed upgrades. Due to this situation, the Ethereum community determined that the best thing to do is to delay the planned Constantinople hard fork.
[SECURITY ALERT] #Constantinople upgrade is temporarily postponed out of caution following a consensus decision by #Ethereum developers, security professionals and other community members. More information and instructions are below. https://t.co/p2znO8HGxf
— Ethereum (@ethereum) January 15, 2019
The blog post explains that security researchers like ChainSecurity and TrailOfBits ran an analysis across the entire blockchain. Although they did not find any cases of the vulnerability ‘in the wild,’ there is a non-zero risk that some contracts could be affected.
A full analysis will take some time to be performed. Because of this reason, the Ethereum community decided to postpone the hard fork.
About it, the Ethereum Foundation wrote:
“Because the risk is non-zero and the amount of time required to determine the risk with confidence is longer the amount of time available before the planned Constantinople upgrade, a decision was reached to postpone the fork out of an abundance of caution.”
The new Ethereum hard fork is expected to reduce the new supply of Ethereum by 33%. The ETH reward received by miners will pass from 3 ETH down to 2 ETH per block found. This might help Ethereum increase its price in the future if there is an increase in the demand. Additionally, selling pressure is going to be reduced in the near future.
In the future, Ethereum wants to move from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm to Proof-of-Stake (PoS). The Constantinople upgrade is just one of the many steps that the network is expected to take in the coming months. Until now, there is no information about the new scheduled date for the hard fork. The Ethereum Foundation will be informing users about it through its social media channels as soon as the scheduled is done.
Ethereum is the third largest digital asset in the market. In the last 24 hours, it has increased its value by 1.77%. It has a market cap of $12.89 billion and each ETH coin can be purchased for $123.48.