Take Two: Ethereum Is Getting Ready for the Constantinople Hard Fork Redo

Such are the words of wisdom that have been taken to heart by ethereum core developers ever since a vulnerability in the network's code was discovered just 48 hours before the code was set to be deployed.

The network upgrade dubbed Constantinople would have introduced a series of backward-incompatible changes - also known as a hard fork - to the world's second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

With the code expected to activate sometime during the last week of February - specifically, at block number 7,280,000 - ethereum core developers are confident that Constantinople won't fail this time around.

While the issue in the code wouldn't have impacted miners directly, miners and other users who run complete copies of the ethereum blockchain called nodes needed to be swiftly notified about the cancellation of Constantinople to keep it from actually being deployed and creating possible disruptions.

Called Ethereum Improvement Proposals, four out of five EIPs will actually be activated on the main network, or mainnet.

Developers proposed during a meeting late January to table the EIP temporarily and proceed with the rest of Constantinople as planned, determining that a fix to the buggy EIP - EIP 1283 - would delay activation of ethereum's planned hard fork for too long.

Given that several test networks on ethereum including Ropsten already activated Constantinople in its full glory before the security vulnerability was found, ethereum core developers also agreed that a second hard fork safely removing the EIP was needed.

Now, as emphasized by ethereum security lead Martin Holst Swende, users of ethereum should be aware of important changes to the ethereum network as a result of Constantinople plus Petersberg.

Tweeting out a questionnaire for users last Thursday, Swende noted that after Constantinople, smart contracts on ethereum considered to be virtually immutable will be able to change code under certain conditions over the course of multiple transactions.

According to one hard fork countdown timer created by Afri Schoedon, release manager for the Parity Ethereum client, Constantinople plus Petersberg is estimated as of press time to go live on Thursday, February 28.