Last month, Unhashed reported on the delay of Ethereum’s Constantinople hard fork. The proposed upgrade, which introduces five backward-compatible improvements to the blockchain, suffered from consensus issues during its testnet deployment.
The new release date was revealed during a core developer meeting held Friday, November 9th. Wednesday, January 16th is the suggested date for mainnet release. Of course, this day could change, should any issues come up along the way.
“We can just say mid-January, it doesn’t make difference if we decide on a date or not. We can always postpone,” divulges developer Péter Szilágyi.
Ethereum Preparing To Update
As reported by Coindesk, Constantinople has already been coded into the biggest Ethereum clients, such as the Ethereum Foundation and the U.K-based Parity. The most popular clients move over $20 billion in cryptocurrency.
Additionally, developer Lane Rettig spoke on a “difficulty bomb.” This feature is built into Ethereum’s code, and it makes blocks harder to mine over time. The goal here is to push constant network updates, lowering the time once again.
Rettig stated that the bomb would take hold in January, meaning we’ll get 30-second block times around Spring of 2019.
“So we have time, there’s no critical concern,” says Rettig.
The Constantinople update will push the difficulty bomb another 18 months. However, it will also lower Ethereum’s mining reward from three ETH down to two.
However, ProgPoW, an update that blocks ASIC miners on the Ethereum network, was not brought up during the meeting. It’s still a question if this feature will make it into Constantinople, but recent reports state that the code is not complete.
Despite all of this, Szilágyi wants the Constantinople hard fork to be out before the end of 2018:
“All clients should release a stable version with the baked in block number before Christmas.”
Finally, ETHNews reports that Afri Shoedon, another core developer, tweeted that the final block number for the Constantinople update will be confirmed on Black Friday:
all-core-devs call: constantinople upgrade for ethereum mainnet activation suggested for 16th of january 2019, block number to be confirmed on black friday in a fortnight
— 𝙰𝚏𝚛𝚒 𝚂𝚌𝚑𝚘𝚎𝚍𝚘𝚗 (@5chdn) November 9, 2018
Unhashed.com is author of this content, TheBitcoinNews.com is is not responsible for the content of external sites.
Our Social Networks: Facebook Instagram Pinterest Reddit Telegram Twitter Youtube
