Ethereum Developers will delay the Constantinople Hard Fork

Ethereum’s Core Developers have released a statement describing their decision to postpone the Constantinople hard fork. The announcement came just hours before the Constantinople hard fork was scheduled to go live. The Ethereum Core Developers and Ethereum Security Community said that their decision was based on a potential vulnerability in one of the software upgrades.

The statement mentions that Security researchers have ran and are still running analysis on the entire Blockchain. Chain Security and TrailofBits are currently working non-stop, but haven’t found so far the cases of the mentioned vulnerability. Of course there is still a risk that some contracts might be affected, something the Ethereum network cannot afford.

Constantinople Hard Fork delayed for Ethereum

This heavy decision was taken mainly because of time. There is absolutely no way to tell how much time it will be required to accurately determine the risk. As the old saying goes: “Better be safe than sorry.”

The statement mentioned that the potential vulnerability stemmped from EIP-1283, which introduces a lower gas cost for SSTORE operations. Security researches believe that if EIP-1283 was activated, a few smart contracts which were already running on Ethereum could have become vulnerable to the so called reentrancy attacks.

ChainSecurity was quick to publish a more in-depth explanation of the potential vulnerability. The delay means that crypto exchanges, miners and other node operators all have a choice to make. They can either upgrade to emergency versions of their Ethereum software clients or downgrade to the pre-fork release.

There is no third option since failing to upgrade a node will result in a disconnect from the main Ethereum network. This is because the Constantinople hard fork software is not compatible with the previous versions.

Fortunately, most Ethereum users – those who are not running full nodes, do not need to undertake any action and their wallets remain secure. This is key information because scammers will do their best to take advantage of the situation and swindle all they can from Crypto holders.

The spirit and morale of the Ethereum community were high before the Constantinople hard fork release since it will implement a number of key upgrades into the Digital Currency’s protocol. Constantinople will also prepare the network to better scale to mainstream usage. The Ethereum block reward will be reduced by 33%, to 2 Ether from 3. Since the situation is very delicate, at the moment there is no new hard fork date announced.

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