Ethereum [ETH] Constantinople and Petersburg hard fork will activate on February 25, 2019

Ethereum [ETH], the third largest cryptocurrency in the space, seems to be all set for the Constantinople hard fork, for the third time. This time the upgrade is going to be different than the one proposed before as there will be two forks taking place on the same block, the first is the initial fork, Constantinople and the second is the Petersburg fork.

According to the latest announcement, the hard forks will be taking place around February 25, 2019, instead of Feb 27, 2019. The hard forks will occur on block #7,280,000 at the estimated time of 11:49:25 UTC.

Afri Schoedon, the hard fork co-ordinator of Ethereum and the release manager at Parity Technologies said on Reddit:

“Got a vague countdown … Constantinople will activate on Monday 2019-02-25 11:54:02 UTC. Current average block time is 16.89 seconds. 91597 blocks to go (7188403/7280000).”

Notably, this is the third time the community is up for a hard fork as the fork was postponed to a later date twice. The first time the fork was pushed to a later date was in the month of October 2018, after the Ropsten Testnest Constantinople hard fork.

During the Testnet fork, the team encountered issues with the difference between Parity and Geth, along with a consensus bug discovered in the Parity implementation of Ethereum. During this timeframe, the team decided to push the hard fork schedule to mid-January 2019.

However, the hard fork scheduled to take place in January was also postponed. This time it was because of one of the Ethereum Improvement Protocols. This protocol is identified to be EIP – 1283: the net gas metering for SStore, wherein the issues with the protocol were disclosed hours before the hard fork’s schedule. According to the official report, this implementation would have resulted in smart contracts being vulnerable to a Reentrancy-attack after the hard fork.

To avoid this from taking place, the team decided that there would be two hard forks taking place on the network, on the same block. The first fork will implement all the changes proposed, whereas the second fork – Petersburg will disable the protocol in which issues were identified.

Garmarilla, a Redditor said:

“Mmmmhmmm lets wait and see about that”