Ethereum [ETH] Constantinople hard fork scheduled to take place in ten days

Ethereum [ETH], the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap and leading smart contract platform, rose to claim the throne of the biggest gainer earlier today. Additionally, most of the coins in the market seem to have gained their momentum from the second largest cryptocurrency in the market.

According to CoinMarketCap, at press time, ETH was trading at $139.24 with a market cap of $14.6 billion. The coin showed a trading volume of $4.84 billion and recorded a rise of over 14% in the past seven days.

More so, ETH is also making strides in terms of development. The project is currently focused on its upcoming upgrade, Constantinople, which is also one of the most awaited hard forks of the year. This hard fork is the second phase of Metropolis – The upcoming phase, the third stage of Ethereum. The first two stages of Ethereum were Frontier and Homestead, and the next stage after Metropolis is Serenity, the stage that introduces Proof-of-Stake [Beacon and Casper] and Plasma on Ethereum.

Constantinople hard fork was initially set to take place towards the end of 2018. However, due to issues that were discovered in the Rinkeby Testnet, the hard fork was pushed ahead to take place in the month of January 2019. The block that was supposed to upgrade the entire network was #7080000, but this was cancelled on the eve of the scheduled date.

This time, one of the bug bounty teams of Ethereum, ChainSecurity discovered that one of the Ethereum Improvement Protocols’ [EIP] would make some smart contracts vulnerable to Reentrancy attacks after the hard fork occurs, resulting in the key stakeholders of Ethereum deciding that the best solution would be to delay the fork again.

In order to solve this problem, Ethereum developers came to a consensus that there would be two forks that would be taking place on the same block, Constantinople and Petersburg. The first fork would implement all the five Ethereum Improvement Protocols and the second fork would disable the protocol that enables Reentrancy attacks or allows them to downgrade.

According to the recent announcement, the hard fork is estimated to take place on 28 February, 2019, ten days from now. The fork will occur on block #7,280,000 around 6:07:41 PM UTC. The data presented by Amerdata shows that at press time, there are around 43,950 blocks remaining before the fork takes place.