The Ethereum network is currently experiencing a chain split. Although the network upgrade has been postponed, there are several miners that did not know about this issue. Because of this situation, around 10% of the miners did not suspend the upgrade to Constantinople.
10% of the Miners Did Not Suspend Constantinople Upgrade
According to some developers, around 10% of the miners did not receive any notification about the decision to delay the Constantinople hard fork. Michael Hahn of MyCrypto said hat the hash rate of the non-Constantinople chain has been reduced after January 16.
Hahn commented about it:
“We were not able to get in contact with every single mining entity about the postponement of the upgrade. Compare the hash rate on the non-Constantinople chain to what the combined chain was pre-fork. Doing this you can see ~10-20TH/S is what is actually missing from the non-Constantinople chain.”
This shows that there are currently more miners on Constantinople than on Ethereum Classic (ETC). Ethereum Classic has recently been 51%-attacked, something that affected the whole market and had a deep impact on ETC.
Even when this seems to be a simple misunderstanding or lack of communication, there is no evidence about it. It might have been just an accidental split or some miners decided to split the chain even known the risks of doing so.
A few hours before the hard fork, Ethereum developers decided not to start the network upgrade scheduled for January 16.
[SECURITY ALERT] #Constantinople upgrade is temporarily postponed out of caution following a consensus decision by #Ethereum developers, security professionals and other community members. More information and instructions are below. https://t.co/p2znO8HGxf
— Ethereum Foundation (@ethereum) January 15, 2019
According to ChainSecurity, a smart contract auditing firm, Constantinople had some vulnerabilities that could have been harmful to users. At the moment, researchers are analysing the entire blockchain trying to find new vulnerabilities and solving bugs found. Although they did not find any case of this specific vulnerability, there is a non-zero risk that some contracts could be affected.
The situation related to the miners that keep mining on the Constantinople network should be solved within the next few hours or days. If the hash rate remains stable, we could suppose that there are some actors that want to keep the Constantinople network running. Nevertheless, the whole Ethereum community has been very united with this hard fork and network upgrade. Back in 2017 and 2018, several contentious hard forks shocked the markets such as Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin SV (BSV).
