Some ETH Miners Didn’t Follow Through With Developer Advice, Now Mining On An Unofficial Chain

Following the discovery of major security risks in a recent audit on Ethereum’s upcoming Constantinople upgrade, Ethereum developers have postponed the launch of the upgrade — but some minors have not followed, leading to community of miners forming a separate chain in which some mining is occurring.

The amount of mining power in this unofficial chain actually exceeds that of Ethereum Classic.

Hotfixes were quickly released to prevent the upgrade, and while the unofficial split is unfortunate, the issue has on the whole been managed well.

Ethereum’s price has not changed significantly upon news of the delay.

The security flaw that was discovered was a re-entrancy attack and Ethereum officials said that although the problem was not encountered in actual cases, there was a “non-zero risk that that some contracts could be affected.”

To be on the safe side, they decided to postpone the upgrade.

The crypto community has long been anticipating the release of Constantinople, which has seen multiple delays. Of course, it’s much better to release a secure upgrade than a hasty one — and Ethereum hard fork coordinator Afri Schoedon has said that it could happen very soon.

Constantinople brings maintenance and optimization improvements to the platform and lays the foundation for off-chain scaling solutions. Two other Ethereum game-changers, Casper and sharding, are expected sometime between 2019 and 2021.