After a double postponement of the much anticipated Ethereum Constantinople otherwise referred to as the Ethereum hardfork, developers are proposing a reschedule of the hardfork to a date not later than 28th of February 2019.
According to developer Peter Szilagyi, the hardfork is expected to go live on block 7, 280,000 presumably on the 27th of February 2019.
“Seems we’re going with block 7.28M for the #Ethereum Constantinople refork scheduled for the 27th of February! Will be a single fork on mainnet and a post-Constantinople fixup fork on the testnets to get them back in line feature wise with the main network,” stated Szilagyi in a tweet
It is believed the aforementioned decision was reached after a crucial phone call meeting that featured key developers including the creator of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin along with other developers the likes of Peter Szilagyi, Danny Ryan, Hudson Jameson, Afri Schoedon, Martin Holste Swende and Lane Rettig among others in an effort to discuss the roadmap for the much postponed hardfork.
The delay
The system wide upgrade of the Ethereum blockchain was all set for the 16th of January 2019 until security researchers unearthed a none-zero risk which would if so implemented have a disturbing effect on some contracts thus the need to address the issue which consequently required more time which resulted to the Constantinople adjournment
“Security researchers like ChainSecurity and TrailOfBits ran (and are still running) analysis across the entire blockchain. They did not find any cases of this vulnerability in the wild. However, there is still a non-zero risk that some contracts could be affected… out of abundance of caution, key stakeholders around the Ethereum community have determined that the best course of action will be to delay the planned Constantinople fork that would have occurred at block 7,080,000 on January 16, 2019,” the firm said in a statement posted in its official blog page
Change of tact
As a consequence of the vulnerability and for the purpose of avoiding further adjournments, the Constantinople is set to activate without the faulty EIP which has since been quarantined for further evaluation and will be included in the subsequent fork. This will see the upgrade implemented in two parts simultaneously on the network. The initial upgrade which will see the implementation of all the five original EIPs and a subsequent upgrade meant specifically to remove the EIP 1283- a proposal initially suggested by Szilagyi
