Last year, everyone in the Ethereum community was looking forward to the promised Constantinople fork. Many believed that this upgrade was going to put an end to the struggles on the Ethereum blockchain and give the ETH token a price boost. Unfortunately, about two days to the upgrade, a blockchain security company discovered a vulnerability on the code that would have made it possible for hackers to steal cryptocurrencies during the fork. For this reason, the core developers had to call off the upgrade and set another date for it.
Ethereum Developers Prepare For Constantinople Upgrade
The upgrade is now scheduled to take place at block 7,280,000. With the vulnerability in control, Ethereum developers are optimistic that nothing would go wrong this time. The Blockchain is expected to reach block 7,280,000 towards the end of February. Then, everyone would know if the upgrade will happen as planned. The head of developer relations at the Ethereum Foundation, Hudson Jameson, said that he believes the upcoming upgrade will go as planned. In his words:
“I believe the upgrade will go as planned. We have already set the block number for the upgrade on the client. So, everything is expected to happen as planned. We learn valuable lessons from every hard fork and one of the significant lessons we learned from our attempt in January is that we need to improve our communication with the miners.”
The issue that was detected in the code last month may not have directly affected miners. However, not all miners who run nodes on the blockchain got the news about the cancelation in time. Some went ahead with the upgrade at a loss. This also caused some disruptions on the main net.
Developers Propose Petersberg
Towards the end of January, the Ethereum developers suggested an alternative to fixing the bug that was found on the code. Petersberg was proposed to remove EIP 1283 from a live network that is like Ethereum. The Constantinople code will activated with Petersberg. The COO of ChainSecurity, Matthias Egli, said that developers who already activated the Constantinople fork do not need to do it again. All they have to do is activate Petersberg. Petersberg will be activated just after Constantinople and it will take precedence over it.
According to Jameson, Petersberg is already set for activation. They have tested the program and all the software involved like Parity and Geth. The developer community is currently educating users about the upcoming changes and how they will affect the network.
Currently, smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain are immutable. What this means is that they cannot be changed. Following the upgrade, however, developers will be able to make changes to the smart contract codes under certain conditions. Also, the Skinny CREATE2 which will be implemented via EIP 1014, will make it easy for the blockchain to process off-chain transactions. This is all part of the broader plan to migrate from the PoW to the PoS consensus mechanism.
Do you think the upcoming fork is going to happen smoothly? Or will it be delayed again for security reasons?
