By Core developers at the Ethereum network have proposed rolling out Constantinople, the much awaited system-wide upgrade, which was postponed last week, in late February.
The upgrade which is also known as a hard fork is set to go live between February 26th and Feb 28th and a block number will be decided at a later stage.
The proposed date was made during a core develop phone call which took place on Friday the 18th of February and participants on the call included ethereum founder and creator Vitalic Buterin as well as core devs – Hudson Jameson, Lane Rettig, Afri Schoedon, Péter Szilágyi, Martin Holste Swende, Danny Ryan and Alexey Akhunov and many others.
As reported by CoinBeat, this decision comes in light of a security breach which smart contract firm ChainSecurity flagged last Tuesday in one of the five Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) which were set to go live during the Constantinople upgrade.
Due to the discovery of this vulnerability, Constantinople is now scheduled to go live next month and the buggy EIP has been removed from this hard fork date but will be tested and fixed for a later hard fork.
The decision was made to complete Constantinople in two simultaneous parts on the main network.
The first upgrade will include all five of the planned EIPs while the second one will remove EIP 1283.
It was developer Péter Szilágyi who proposed this strategy during the call and the strategy here is to ensure that both test networks and private ones which have already implemented the Constantinople upgrade will be able to easily implemented a fix without any block rollbacks.
Szilágyi explained:
“My suggestions is to define two hard forks, Constantinople as it is currently and the Constantinople fix up which just disables this feature…By having two forks everyone who actually upgraded can have a second fork to actually downgrade so to speak,” explained Szilágyi.
Matthias Egli, COO of ChainSecurity highlighted that the security vulnerability which was found, would not have easily been picked up by core developers when running routine tests as the impact of the issue lies deep within smart contract development, not necessarily “[ethereum virtual machine] core” development.
A hasty decision was made to reactivate Constantinople rather sooner than later due to the necessary prolonged activation of the ethereum difficulty bomb which is a piece of code in the blockchain which will eventually make block times creation longer over time.
This move was decided upon to encourage the transition to a new consensus algorithm called proof-of-stake (PoS) and thus a delay of the bomb was proposed as part of EIP 1234 due to insufficient research of PoS at this time.
When Constantinople is activated on mainnet, it will include EIP 1234 and this will delay the difficulty bomb for a year.
What are your thoughts on the upcoming hard fork and ETH developers decisions to delay Constantinople until February? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
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