After postponing the Constantinople Fork because of a vulnerability in the upgraded code, the Ethereum Core developers have decided on a new date for the hard fork's deployment.
According to Ethereum Team Lead, Péter Szilágyi, the much-anticipated upgrade is now set for block number 7,280,000, scheduled to hit on February 27th.
"Seems we're going with block 7.28M for the #Ethereum Constantinople refork scheduled for the 27th of February!" Szilágyi Tweeted Friday. "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."
The proposal was made during a core developer phone call on Friday morning, and participants on the call included ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin and other developers, including Hudson Jameson, Lane Rettig, Afri Schoedon, Péter Szilágyi, Martin Holste Swende, Danny Ryan and Alexey Akhunov, among others. - Coindesk
The postponement of the fork came after blockchain security firm, Chain Security, discovered a code change within the network upgrade to lower the cost of gas while transacting on the network has caused an "unwanted side effect" that would allow a hacker to conduct a "reentrancy" attack.
A reentrancy attack would allow an attacker to “reenter” the same function multiple times without updating the user about the state of affairs. According to Joanes Espanol, CTO of blockchain analytics firm Amberdata, under this scenario an attacker could essentially be “withdrawing funds forever.”
As a result of the vulnerability, Constantinople, now set for activation next month, will not feature inclusion of the buggy EIP, which will be tested and refashioned for inclusion in a subsequent hard fork.
Instead, Constantinople will be issued in two parts simultaneously on the main network. The first upgrade will include all five original EIPs and a second upgrade will specifically remove EIP 1283.
This strategy – first suggested by Szilágyi during today’s call – is meant to ensure that test networks and private networks that have already implemented the full Constantinople upgrade can easily implement a fix without rolling back any blocks - Coindesk
The Constantinople hard fork is set to bring on a number of upgrades to the Ethereum network and is being touted as the gateway for the network to transition from a Proof of Work blockchain to a Proof of Stake system.
The details include:
EIP 145
This focuses on adding shifting bitwise operators to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) for the efficient processing of information.
EIP 1014
Improves scaling solutions of the accommodating network like the off-chain transactions.
EIP 1052
An upgrade of smart contracts processing system.
EIP 1234
Focuses on reducing rewards issued to miners from 3 ETH to 2 ETH per block.
EIP 1283
Offers a better alternative to monetizing changes done by smart contract programmers on data storage.
While the announcement of the delay sent the price of Ether tumbling this week, The Freedonia Cooperative over at Seeking Alpha writes that investors have little to worry about.
It's simply too risky to release an upgrade with any kind of security risk. We've seen too many exchanges and coins hacked for Ethereum to roll something out just to hit a deadline. So the Constantinople delay, while slightly discouraging, is the right move. And the market responded with confidence, seeing a flat day for ETH prices.