Ethereum testnet successfully completed the fork, and the Constantinople upgrade entered the countdown

Ethereum is ready for the upcoming Constantinople hard fork. The hard fork took more than a year to develop and was originally scheduled to be executed at the end of last year. As the technology is not yet mature, the upgrade has been scheduled to be completed on January 16 this year, at block height #7080000.

Today, the Ethereum development team took the lead in completing the fork of the test network Rinkeby. Ethereum core developer Peter Szilagyi subsequently announced that the test network had successfully forked and upgraded to Constantinople, achieving a complete separation between the new and old nodes.

Along with Rinkeby, Ropsten and Kovan are all Ethereum test networks, where developers usually test updates before deploying them to ensure that the blockchain works properly.

The successful fork of the Rinkeby test network brought positive signals to the upcoming Constantinople fork. The Constantinople fork was delayed until 2019 because another test network, Ropsten, generated a three-way fork during the test. It is reported that the failure of this test was due to the consensus vulnerability of the Ethereum client Parity and the lack of miner participation in software such as Parity, Geth and Aleth.

In a recent Ethereum core developer meeting, the team decided to deploy ProgPOW in the hope of resisting ASIC mining machines. If all goes well, the solution is expected to be successfully deployed in the next few months.