Ethereum

Ethereum Issuance Reduction Fork Testnet Block Confirmed

from Trust Nodes 5 years ago 0 0 976

Ethereum developers have confirmed the block number for Constantinople, the biggest public blockchain upgrade of the year out of the top coins.

In a Core Devs meeting just concluded, they have settled on block number 4.2 million, which should be around mid-day on October the 9th.

Lane Rettig, an eth dev, kindly took upon himself the task of calculating how many seconds there are between now and the already previously agreed date of October 9th for the testnet fork.

He said we’re currently at block 4.131 million, running at about 14 seconds per block on ethereum’s Ropsten testnet. There would be ~68,000 blocks from now until October 9th, Rettig said, so he rounded it up to a nice 4.2 million.

After that blazing block, there would probably be about three weeks of testnet testing, with this potentially now to go live during early November.

All major clients have completed the implementation of Constantinople, with just final touches left until ethereum’s new issuance is reduced by 33% from 3 eth per block to 2 eth.

The upgrade further contains some efficiency gains for the network, as well as a delay of ethereum’s increase in block times coded into the protocol to incentivize the upgrade to Proof of Stake (PoS) Casper.

Such delay will be there for 12 months. In the meantime Casper is to be coded and finalized, with Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, stating that specification wise there is now definitely more verification than research.

“A lot of work on the peer-to-peer protocol side. My impression is that the protocol is increasingly a good kind of stable,” Buterin said.

So suggesting Casper might not be that far off. Nor improvements to Ethereum’s Virtual Machine (EVM), which is to get an upgrade with e-WASM.

Rettig says e-WASM is on testnet. There are nodes up and running, all is “easily stable,” they are “ironing out bugs,” he says it’s “exciting stuff” and they are “getting ready to release a bunch of documentation for Devcon.”

Devcon IV is to start October 30th, now in just a few weeks, when Rettig’s work may be one of many to be presented in Prague as the entire ethereum ecosystem is put on display at the mercy of your judgment.

The Metropolis Constantinople issuance upgrade then follows, with all eyes then turning to Casper thereafter which apparently is now “a good kind of stable.”