Ethereum Developers to Postpone “Constantinople” Hard Fork for January 2019

The update, called “Constantinople,” was first put on the tests on Ethereum’s Ropsten public testnet on October 13th. The testnet is a miniature version of the mainnet, but without the needed computing power for the execution of tests.

At the developers meeting, which lasted over an hour, devs reached a consensus that “Constantinople” should be postponed at least until January 2019, due to “compliance issues.”

“Constantinople” has been live on Ropsten since October 13th and showed developers have some more work to do. “Constantinople” was launched on blocks 4, 230, 000 but quickly stalled at blocks 4, 229, 999 for over two hours. Testnet miners couldn’t make the shift to block 4, 230, 000. One of Ethereum’s lead developers, Alfri Schoeden, explained that the transition could not be initiated due to “consensus issues”, leading to a three-way fork between Ethereum (ETH) clients, Parity and Geth.

Schoeden also noted that miners were not available to mine on the testnet, hence the two-hour delay to transition to block 4, 230, 000. The developer also stated that Ethereum’s community has no access to the hard fork monitoring, aside from http://ropsten-stats.parity.io, but the website does not give enough detailed information about the different chains.

On Ethereum’s core dev meet up, developer Hudson Jameson proposed regular spawning and mining testnets to test “Constantinople” and the way the hard fork will work.

The hard fork is a system-wide update, aimed to increase Ethereum’s network efficiency. It also plans to decrease rewards for mining and increase the resistance to ASIC mining rigs.