After months of delays and anxiety, the much anticipated Ethereum Constantinople scheduled for ‘late February’ is almost due. Users in the ecosystem have been questioning the preparability of the system to implement the upgrade given the double postponement owing to uncertainties.
However, Hudson Jameson, the developers’ relations manager, in an interview with crypto news outlet Coindesk said he is optimistic the Constantinople, this time round, will successfully implement.
“I suspect it will go as planned. The block number has been set and [the upgrade] is hard coded in the clients now so it’s going along fine,” Hudson said. In addition, Hudson noted that important lessons have been learned from every hardfork, especially “better communication with miners to let them know about the upgrade” which was the key take away from the previous hardfork.
The system wide upgrade is expected to implement on the world’s second largest crypto network after Bitcoin somewhere during the last week of February (presumably on 28th) on block 7,280,000.
Delays
The Ethereum Constantinople, which was initially scheduled for November last year, was first postponed to January 17, 2019 after a number of bugs were discovered during the dry run
“I keep getting the feeling that we’re trying to rush this and I would second that we should breathe and see what happens,” Afri Schoedon said during a live-streamed meeting involving all the developers. It was then that the January schedule was arrived at since continuing with the project the next month (December) would be deemed unwise. The delay would then allow adequate time to look into the system including installation of an additional feature dubbed “ProgPow”- a feature “aimed at shoring up ethereum’s resistance to the specialized mining hardware.”
After a month and a half of waiting, the Constantinople was ripe for implementation at about 04:00 UTC, January 17, 2019. However, 48 hours prior to the upgrade a significant vulnerability was discovered which meant yet another postponement.
“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
To this end, developers are convinced the Constantinople, this time round, won’t disappoint. A hardfork countdown timer designed by Afri Schoedon indicates the Constantinople will go live on Thursday, February 28, 2019. The upgrade can also be streamed in real time from Ethernodes or forkmon.ethdevops.io
