Ethereum core developers made it known in the last bi-weekly meeting on Friday, October 19, 2018, that Ethereum’s next system-wide upgrade Constantinople, will be postponed until 2019.
It had been initially primed for release in November 2018 but the discovery of several bugs in the code released on Ethereum’s public testnet Ropsten, made developers opt for the postponement of the hardfork.
Rendering his opinion during the live-streamed meeting, developer Afri Schoeden said the upgrade should not be rushed, so every little detail could be accounted for.
“I keep getting the feeling that we’re trying to rush this and I would second that we should breathe here and see what happens.”
Constantinople is part of Ethereum’s four-stage development plan to enforce reforms that will help in obtaining signature verification and purify protocols, removing technical details not needed as a component in a tree. It’s designed to be the final half of a protocol upgrade that moves the Ethereum protocol from a Proof-of-Work consensus to a Proof-of-Stake. It
Other proposed changes will nevertheless be affected by the delay as well. Security lead at the Ethereum Foundation Martin Holste Swende said the delay could afford them the time to add code for another proposal dubbed “ProgPow” into Constantinople.
Programmatic Proof of Work (ProgPow) is a proof-of-work algorithm created to address the centralization problem of mining, by minimizing the benefits accrued to miners that use specialized secretly developed ASICs. The developers had dismissed the idea of adding the algorithm into Constantinople, at the last meeting, agreeing to consider it for Istanbul, the next hard fork planned for mid-2019.
Swende argued that if Constantinople won’t be launched “until January or February,” then it’s only expedient that the developers look into including the ProgPow algorithm into Constantinople. Hudson Jameson, communications officer for the Foundation, however, believes there is a huge task ahead for the developers in preparing the network for the mainnet before the release of Constantinople.
While shedding light on some of these items, he highlighted proper coordination with miners as being essential for the switch to mainnet.