Ethereum [ETH] Constantinople hard fork will take place on Mainnet without EIP 1283

The entire Ethereum community has been up and running with the announcement of the postponement of Constantinople hard fork. During the recent Ethereum core dev meeting, the team discussed the issue found in the upgrade and came to consensus on the next schedule for the hard fork.

The meeting started with an update on the difficulty bomb, wherein Lane Rettig, a core developer spoke briefly on the topic. Rettig stated that the difficulty bomb has already “started to tick”. “So I believe if you look at the block times, we’ve had like one visible tick up so far above the current difficulty level,” the developer added.

“The second point to make we just need to keep reiterating this is that while it took, you know, six months or whatever for that to happen in 2017, it’s gonna happen faster this time because we’re at an overall higher much higher network hash power than we were last time so we still have a few months but it’s ticking”

Following this, the team spoke about the issue found in one of the EIPs, which led to the delay of the hard fork altogether. The vulnerability was bought to light by ChainSecurity, a smart contract audit firm. The firm revealed that EIP 1283: the net gas metering for SSTORE without dirty maps, would open doors for a reentrancy attack after the hard fork. Soon after this news broke, both Geth and Parity teams released an emergency version, to revert the hard fork, for all the node operators, exchanges, and miners.

Now, the team has decided that the hard fork will take place around February 27, 2019, on block #7,280,000. Additionally, the team has come to a consensus that EIP 1283 will not be implemented in the upcoming hard fork. Afri Schoedon, the hardfork coordinator at Ethereum and Release Manager at Parity Technologies said on Twitter:

“#Ethereum all-core-devs call: Constantinople will be activated in around six weeks on mainnet without EIP-1283. Testnets will undergo hard forks to remove EIP-1283. Exact date and block number to be announced soon. A patched version of EIP-1283 might be included in a subsequent network upgrade. But that needs further discussion and testing.”

Peter Szilagyi, team lead at Ethereum said:

“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.”