- Constantinople was expected to go live today Sunday October 14, 2018 on Ropsten.
- Failure blamed on lack of consensus.
- Constantinople is expected to be Ethereum’s largest upgrade.
The eagerly awaited Constantinople Hard Fork will not be happening, anyway. The Ethereum ecosystem expected the release of Constantinople to go live today Sunday, October 14, 2018
Release Goes Haywire
Ethereum’s upcoming hard fork, christened ‘Constantinople’ was all set to become activated on the Ropsten block number 4,230,000. However, reliable information from exploring sites like Blockscout and Etherscan show that the Ropsten network got stuck at block 4,299,999.
The release manager for the Ethereum client parity Afri Schoedon has stated that lack of miners on the Ropsten network caused the stall to push the newly upgraded blockchain ahead. Schoedon wrote on the Gitter Channel:
“The fact that all clients are ‘stuck’ means that there is no valid Constantinople block yet.”
The testnet release had been scheduled to happen last week but was postponed to Sunday October 14th after a bug was discovered in one of the five changes of Constantinople. Even as late as yesterday, a client’s meeting with several software clients confirmed that everything was in place for the test to take place. However, lead developer Afri Schoedon gave the bad news in a tweet stating:
no constantinople in 2018, we have to investigate
— ???? ???????? (@5chdn) October 13, 2018
Upgrade’s Long-term Implications
Constantinople is one of Ethereum’s largest upgrades which is expected to bring on board several positive changes to Ethereum’s blockchain and introduce several better end user-experiences. One of the most notable of the expected changes is a block reward deduction from 3 ETH to 2 ETH every 14 seconds.
The 33 percent reduction of block rewards is expected to drastically improve the Ether inflation rate, which is currently 7.4 percent annually. According to Venezuelan cryptocurrency commentator Eduardo Gomez, the move is comparable to a “Bitcoin block reward halving event;” he said the prices will first dump before they moon in the months after the event.
There was what appeared to be an urgent plea to developers to access the “monitoring Geth note to start mining” but unfortunately nothing positive seems to have happened. Schoedon seemed to allude to the fact that the weekend was probably not the best time for the release of Constantinople on Ropsten “Not for later: never fork on weekends.”
Ropsten is a useful tool for Ethereum developers giving them a platform for testing the performance of new codes in a simulated environment away from the main ecosystem. Ethereum successfully tested the Byzantium hard fork that took place last year on Ropsten for about a month before it was officially released on Ethereum’s MainNet. The delayed release hasn’t been confirmed by other developers and it’s not clear when it will happen again.
