The arrow has to be shot: 97% of Ethereum holders support the hard fork, leaving only 10 days for the development team

The hard fork plan was unanimously approved by the vote of Ethereum holders. The community conducted a hard fork to recover investors' losses and to prevent the young Ethereum from collapsing.

The vote was reportedly conducted on the blockchain and was open and transparent. The results showed that nearly 97% of Ethereum holders (holding more than 1.5 million Ethereum, equivalent to US$15 million) were in favor of the hard fork, while only 3% of holders (holding less than 40,000 Ethereum) voted against it.

The unprecedented unanimous decision of the Ethereum community proves that the hard fork has been confirmed. The focus now is on the specific implementation plan. The time left for the community is running out. The community must complete the upgrade of the hard fork code before July 21. After the 21st, the situation will only become more complicated.

Although the hard fork is a fait accompli, no specific plan has been decided yet. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin also has his own plan. What this plan ignores is that before the hacker attack, the "innocent" childDAO contract ether withdrawal (withdrawal operation not for the purpose of attack) was split and investors dispersed their tokens into certain extra balance accounts (including their own) to quickly resolve the entire crisis.

The focus of the community is now on the fork code. The only thing the community knows is that the developers will release the code "soon". Nick Johnson, a software engineer at the Ethereum Foundation, said that pull requests have begun to increase recently, which shows that the development team is working hard to write code. Although he knows that the community is waiting anxiously, he explained that the development team just wants to make sure everything is foolproof. As for whether the hard fork code will produce many changes, Johnson said: The hard fork code does not change much to the original system, but only transfers the balance between blocks. However, writing code to prevent the recurrence of attacks is a complicated process, so comprehensive testing will definitely take longer. For example, the development team's code needs to ensure that all nodes are synchronized with the correct chain after the fork, and this alone requires a lot of effort.

Péter Szilágyi, an Ethereum Foundation developer who wrote the hard fork code, said: The consensus mechanism for hard forks is relatively easy to implement, but it is difficult to synchronize the network, and most clients don't even notice this. The Geth client can synchronize quickly, and also provides a light sync function. But in order to implement the light sync function, you need to distinguish between those who support fork and those who oppose fork, which requires a lot of work. The problem with the soft fork was that we were too impatient and didn't think carefully enough, so we don't want to make the same mistake again this time. At present, we are conducting comprehensive tests by simulating the situations of different clients and constantly upgrading the code.

Now that the community has decided to hard fork, the code should be updated quickly. Szilagyi said that they plan to release the code within two weeks, but it is not clear what the specific situation will be by then.

If all goes well, Ethereum will be telling the world that there are protections in place within the community when things go wrong. The first line of defense is the smart contract lock function, which can delay attackers and buy time for the community to get their funds back. If this was a transaction attack, the stolen funds would have been dispersed across countless different addresses, and no matter what was done, it would have been too late. Therefore, this Ethereum upgrade is likely to indicate that smart contracts will become more secure.

The second line of protection lies in the community itself. The Ethereum community tells the world that they see Ethereum as a technology, not a fantasy. Therefore, when unusual vulnerabilities appear, the community will intervene at the appropriate time to protect the ecosystem and its members. This is what makes the Ethereum community different from Bitcoin.

Ethereum has successfully resisted a catastrophic attack and proved to be the most secure platform without wasting millions of dollars. The community will never forget this incident because they learned a lot from it. Unlike other platform attacks, Ethereum’s crisis should not be seen as a tragedy because developers, investors, and users bravely stood up to face this challenge.

The hard fork is a fait accompli, and the community is ready to move forward. Chronicled recently announced that it will use the Ethereum blockchain for high-end sports shoes anti-counterfeiting. Ethereum Global Developer Conference DEVCON2 will also be held as scheduled, and Microsoft will become its largest sponsor. In addition, the Mist browser has also been officially released.