The Constantinople upgrade of Ethereum was postponed just before a day when it was expected to activate at block# 7,080,000. A blockchain audit firm ChainSecurity discovered a security vulnerability in one of the EIPs considered for the upgrade on January 16th. Out of an abundance of caution, key stakeholders around the Ethereum community determined that there was not sufficient time to fix the bug and the best course of action is to delay the planned Constantinople fork.
Report explains that the bug, found in Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP 1283), would have allowed malicious attackers to withdraw funds “forever” also known as a re-entrancy attack. EIP 1283 would have enabled new usages for contract storage, and reduced excessive gas costs enabling re-entrancy attacks in certain smart contracts.
A security alert on Ethereum Constantinople Postponement by Ethereum Team was released with details.
In last Core Dev Call on Friday, Ethereum developers decided to delay the hardfork by six weeks. Péter Szilágyi, from Geth team suggested to take this upgrade in two parts and second one to be executed on the same block, will actually downgrade it by removing EIP 1283. Since, test networks and private networks have already activated Constantinople, it will be helpful to prevent them from breaking. Tentatively, Constantinople refork is scheduled at block 7,280,000, on Wednesday, February 27.
It will be two separate upgrades executed simultaneously. The first, Constantinople, will launch all five Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP) originally planned and the second - Petersberg, will roll back EIP 1283.
two separate upgrades executed simultaneously. The first, Constantinople, will launch all five Ethereum Improvement Proposals originally planned, while a second, dubbed Petersberg, will roll back EIP 1283, the source of the security flaw.
Serenity, Proof-of-Stake, Sharding - all that is completely unrelated to protocol upgrades on the Ethereum 1.0 chain. Constantinopele delays do not at all impact the steady and ongoing progress of Casper/sharding/serenity, explains Afri from Parity team.
The teams researching and building on the 2nd iteration of Ethereum are independently working on Ethereum 2.0 and Proof-of-Stake will not be delayed because we postpone a protocol upgrade on the legacy chain.
Furthermore, it's important to understand that Proof-of-Stake, the so-called "phase 0" / the "beacon chain," will not be a hardfork, unlike other milestones.
Beacon chain will be seen on testnets very soon, within weeks or months. Also, the Serenity milestone can be expected within a year, says the post.
Read more: Constantinople - the winding up of Metropolis phase
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