Ethereum‘s Constantinople Hard Fork Suffers a Consensus Issue

The recently forked Ethereum is currently undergoing a consensus issue. The Constantinople fork has caused a testnet to become inoperable.

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Ethereum‘s developers are working hard to repair Ropsten – a testnet that has become unusable because of the Constantinople fork. The community is advising users to use other Ethereum testnets.

The problem was announced by Infura, an Ethereum-based blockchain ecosystem, on October 13th. The same day Constantinople became active on the testnet at block number 4,230,000. That is when the fork caused the issue.

Afri Schoedon, an Ethereum developer, stated in a tweet that the official release of Constantinople would be delayed. The hard fork will not be active in 2018, because of significant concerns on Ropsten. The team will have to investigate further to find out the underlying reason for the problem.

The Ethereum developer has also added that the next developer meeting will be on Friday, October 19th when they will discuss the topic and how to overcome the obstacle.

The Ethereum Foundation chose the Constantinople hard fork system to increase the network‘s efficiency while changing the consensus algorithm to Proof of Stake.

To apply it, developers created the so-called Difficulty Bomb to generate difficult and unfavorable blocks. Piper Merriam, another Ethereum developer, started an Improvement Proposal (EIP) on Github where he suggested the idea of a hard fork to invalidate ASIC miners.

The upcoming fork has raised a lot of discussions among the Ethereum community, with the main concerns being a possible centralization risk and a network impact.

As of October 15th, Ethereum is trading at 197 US dollars and is down by 1,5 percent in the past 24 hours.

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