Ethereum’s forthcoming network upgrade may have gotten a tentative launch date following Friday, September 6th core developers meeting.
According to the meeting, the testnet to try out the six proposed EIPs has been set to early October, a month after the initial date which was to be launched on September 4th this week.
This also means that the launch to Mainnet will similarly be delayed to November this year. In the Friday meeting, Ethereum Foundation’s community manager Hudson Jameson stated that:
“For anyone listening in who doesn’t know how this works, we pick a block number that we estimate to be around the 2nd of October, however, that might be one or two days behind or forward from that date based on how fast blocks are produced between now and then.”
So October 2nd it is, however, the developers did not settle on a block number for the activation on the Ropsten testnet. As stated, only six EIPs out of the proposed 30 have been accepted o be included in the Istanbul hard fork while another eight have been pushed to the proceeding hard fork dubbed Berlin.
One of those proposed EIPs is the controversial ProgPoW update which is designed to change the mining algorithm to ensure that ASICs are virtually ineffective in mining blocks on the Ethereum network.
ASICs are specialized mining equipment that is many times more efficient and powerful that the graphical processing units that are popular with Ethereum miners.
This particular update has been in discussion for close to a year now. Part of the discussions included hiring two auditors to go over the code to ensure that it is economically stable and programmatically sound to roll onto to the Mainnet. One of the auditors’ – Least Authority – CEO Liz Steininger attended Friday’s meeting and she said that:
“On a high-level, [ProgPoW] reaches its design goals. It’s reasonable towards its intended economic effect. No major issues there. That said, we did find one [potential] attack … and had some recommendations about things that could be done to have better assurances of ProgPoW working as intended in the future.”
The other auditor is more focused on the hardware part of the proposal and according to Jameson, should be submitting their report pretty soon. He said:
“Bob’s audit should be coming out very soon. It’s in final stages [and] is going to answer a lot more of the questions and speculations around ProgPoW.”
Any expressed concerns on the feasibility of the implementation of the EIP will need to be addressed before the EIP is included in the Berlin Hardfork.
