Ethereum’s Constantinople hard fork in testing setback

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The testing of a planned hard fork of Ethereum, called Constantinople, has suffered a major setback.

Ethereum blockchain infrastructure firm Infura tweeted that there has been a “consensus issue” with the Constantinople fork, making the Ropsten testnet currently unusable.

The California-based firm advises developers to use one of the other Ethereum testnets while its development community investigates.

The Constantinople hard fork is a system-wide Ethereum update which is designed to increase the network’s efficiency. However, the release of the upgrade is dependent on a successful roll-out of the Ropsten testnet.

Afri Schoedon, an Ethereum developer at Parity, went on to say that following the glitch there would be “no Constantinople in 2018”. “To add to this, we just agreed on the last all-core-dev call on Friday that we will not be able to activate Constantinople this year if there are any major issues on Ropsten,” he tweeted.

E.G. Galano, Co-founder and Chief Infrastructure Engineer at Infura, claimed the client development teams “worked hard over the weekend to find the root cause and seem to be nearing a fix”.

The test release was previously delayed two weeks ago when a bug was found within one of Constantinople’s five network changes, which include minor code optimisations and a reduction in mining rewards for each block of transactions.

Emily Perryman

Emily is an award-winning financial journalist with over a decade of experience writing for consumer, trade and national publications. She writes about FinTech, investments, pensions, property and healthcare. Her work has appeared in titles such as The Financial Times, The Independent and Shares magazine.