Ethereum's Much-Awaited Constantinople Hard Fork Gets Delayed to 2019

During the latest meeting on Friday, October 19, developers announced that Ethereum’s Constantinople hardfork shall be postponed to early 2019. Initially scheduled for November launch next month, the developers came to decide on postponing the hardfork after several bugs were found in the code released on the Ropsten testnet last week.

Now the developers are planning to release it by late January 2019 or early February 2019. During the live-streamed meeting on Friday, developer Afri Schoeden was quoted saying: "I keep getting the feeling that we're trying to rush this and I would second that we should breathe and see what happens.”

The Constantinople hardfork will bring five critical and backward-incompatible changes to the network. These include some of the minor ones like code optimizations to more critical ones like which will reduce the amount of new ETH created with each transaction block.

The delay in Constantinople’s launch to next year shall see additional changes and code optimizations says Martin Holste Swende, security lead at the Ethereum Foundation. He notes that developers can add code for another proposal, named “ProgPow”, in Constantinople.

ProgPow also addresses one of Ethereum’s major issue which is increasing resistance to the specialized mining hardware. Many believe that the use of ASIC mining chips is resulting into centralization of mining process into the hands of wealthy. As a result, there is no level playing for smaller mining operations using GPUs.

"I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if we do decide that Constantinople isn't until January or February, then I would probably try to push for including ProgPoW into Constantinople," Swende said.

The implementation of ProgPow was discussed during earlier meetings of the Ethereum’s core developer teams. However, the team then had decided that the code couldn’t be rushed into Constantinople. Instead, if it was agreed through consensus, it could be added to the Ethereum’s network with the help of another hardfork after the Constantinople.

Ethereum Foundation communication officer Hudson Jameson told developers on Friday that they have a lot more to do and prepare the release of Constantinople on the Ethereum mainnet. While highlighting one of the important changes, Hudson said: "We need to coordinate more with miners on when we switch over hash power and that also includes mainnet."