Ethereum Developers Delay the Launch of Constantinople Hard Fork Testnet

Last week, Ethereum developers announced that they have delayed their plans to launch the upcoming Constantinople hardfork citing vulnerability issues. Constantinople is Ethereum’s system-wide upgrade which was earlier scheduled to launch on the test network Ropsten on 9th of October.

Peter Szilagyi, the team lead at the Ethereum Foundation said that the major reason of the delay is to address the vulnerability in one of the five Constantinople upgrades. In his tweet Peter wrote: “Via community decision, we've delayed the #Ethereum Ropsten testnet Constantinople hard fork by 1 epoch to block #4230000 (+5 days) to allow clients to implement, test and release an update to CREATE2, countering a recently found EVM DoS attack vector.”

Furthermore, the delay is also expected to give Ropsten users, who are currently testing other off-chain scaling solutions like Raiden, to prepare for a possible network split that could occur as an outcome of implementing Constantinople.

The upcoming Constantinople hard fork is expected to bring some important upgrades like code execution, block reward issuance, data storage, and much more. The active nodes on the Ropsten will have to make sure that they implement all these changes simultaneously. Else, there is a risk of splitting the network in two different blockchains.

One of the Raiden network developers, Lefteris Karapetsas, that if the Ethereum network split were to occur for even a temporary period of time, it would make it impossible for them to test the program as it was too close for the release of the mainnet. Hence he asked them to further postpone the date.

To avoid any additional complications from occurring on the Ethereum testnet, ethereum core developer Alexey Akhunov proposed an idea saying that an alternative option was to separately launch temporary testnet to Ropsten while resolving other obvious problems in the code.

Constantinople is now set for 14th of October at the block 4.23 million. Further delays could possibly lead to even more troubles for the developers considering other lined up schedules. Hence we expect that there would be no more delay beyond this.