ETH Constantinople Hard Fork to Activate in February 2019

Ethereum (ETH) core developers have delayed the activation of the Constantinople hard fork until the month of February. The upgrade is now going to be executed at ETH block 7,280,000. The team lead at Ethereum, Peter Szilagyi, tweeted:

Seems we're going with block 7.28M for the #Ethereum Constantinople refork scheduled for the 27th of February! Will be a single fork on mainnet and a post-Constantinople-fixup fork on the testnets to get them back in line feature wise with the main network.

— Péter Szilágyi (@peter_szilagyi) January 18, 2019

The proposal was presented during a core developer phone call on Friday, and members on the call involved Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin and other developers such as Hudson Jameson, Lane Rettig, Afri Schoedon, Péter Szilágyi, Martin Holste Swende, Danny Ryan and Alexey Akhunov, among others. The hard fork is now programmed to befall on February 27th on block number 7,280,000.

Vulnerabilities Drive to Ethereum (ETH) Constantinople Delay

The conclusion arrives after smart contract audit company ChainSecurity found a possible security vulnerability on Tuesday. Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1283, if executed, could give attackers a knothole in the code to take user reserves. Hence, Ethereum developers had agreed to postpone the hard fork temporarily.

The ETH Constantinople hard fork will not highlight the addition of the buggy EIP, which will be examined and reconfigured for the embodiment in a following hard fork. Rather, Constantinople will be circulated in two parts concurrently on the main network. The initial upgrade will incorporate all five original EIPs and a second upgrade will explicitly exclude EIP 1283.

This approach was first proposed by Szilágyi during Friday’s meeting. It is intended to secure that examination networks and special networks that have previously executed the full Constantinople upgrade can efficiently execute a fix without operating back any blocks.

Szilágyi said

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.

Constantinople is the name of Ethereum’s next hard fork system upgrade. It is a member of the multi-step course towards Serenity, which executes advanced rules such as Proof of Stake. The vulnerability provides a possible hacker to seize cryptocurrency from a smart contract on the network by regularly demanding stocks from it while filling it fabricated data about the ill-disposed player’s real ETH balance. In order to cover the knothole, the release of the upgrade had been suspended.

The security audit firm ChainSecurity found that the expected Constantinople Upgrade for the Ethereum network offers cheaper gas cost for some SSTORE actions. As an undesired side impact, this allows reentrancy attacks when applying address.transfer(…) or address.send(…) in Solidity smart contracts.

One of the significant threats of summoning external contracts is that they can obtain the control flow, and execute modifications to the data that the calling function wasn’t demanding. This kind of bug can take numerous classes.

Ethereum Network Witnesses Chain Split

The Ethereum network is currently experiencing a chain split. There are numerous miners that did not apprehend this matter. Because of this circumstance, almost 10% of the miners did not waive the upgrade to Constantinople.

Compared to the hash rate earlier eliminated Hard Fork, the Ethereum network now requires almost 10 and 20 TH / s. This indicates that about ten percent of miners have advanced towards the Constantinople update.

The upgrade has been considered for almost a year and proposes a hard fork on the Etheruem chain with new characteristics to make scaling the network more simpler and build the route to limited dependence on ETH mining. The ETH strategy to delay this fork seems a good strategy because it is completely too dangerous to deliver an upgrade with any sort of security risk. So the Constantinople obstruction, while imperceptibly disheartening, is the correct progress.

Disclaimer: This information should not be interpreted as an endorsement of any cryptocurrency. It is not a recommendation to trade. The crypto market is full of surprises and overhyped assets. Do your research before buying anything. Do not invest more than you can afford to lose.

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