Constantinople hard fork on Ethereum network postponed to January

The Constantinople Ethereum (ETH) code update, a long-awaited hard fork that was previously scheduled to take place in late October but was delayed due to technical issues, has now received a confirmed release schedule.

During Friday's Ethereum Open Source Core Development Team meeting on December 7, the team agreed to activate the fork at block 7,080,000 on the Ethereum blockchain.

Estimates based on current block generation times and the number of blocks remaining before the designated activation block could take approximately 38 days. That is, Constantinople will be released between January 14 and 18, 2019.

The decision to postpone the release of Constantinople was made after the unsuccessful release of the code update on the Ropsten test network. The problem, which the developers called a “failed consensus,” between three popular Ethereum-based clients, including Geth and Parity.

This technical issue caused the testnet blockchain to freeze for approximately two hours, just one block before the scheduled activation. A week later, the core developers met, deciding to fix bugs in the code.

The proposed code update would introduce five Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) that would be incompatible with the current version of the Ethereum blockchain and there is a possibility that Ethereum could split into multiple blockchains, as has happened before. 

The updates include delaying the implementation of Ethereum's mining difficulty increase algorithm or so-called "difficulty bomb" for another 18 months, reducing the reward for mining blocks from the current 3ETH to 2ETH (what the developers called "two-thirds") and switching to the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm.

At Friday's meeting, developers also discussed the next upcoming update to the Ethereum code, dubbed Ethereum 1x, scheduled for release in June 2019.

It has been decided that all future meetings regarding the Ethereum 1.x update will be livestreamed and recorded to increase openness and accountability.