In early October, Ethereum World News reported that the development team of the Ethereum core, after months of developing Constantinople has taken steps to take the upgrade of the blockchain to the Ropsten testnet of the network. The belief of the developers back then was that, if the test was successful, by the end of October, the upload of Constantinople to the mainnet will take place. However, after the upgrade on Ropsten, it was obvious that something was wrong; the fork stalled for 2 hours at block 4,299,999, revealing issues faced by Constantinople. Even with the continuation of the testnet, the post-hard fork blocks initially showed zero transactions. Later on, parity developer, Afri Schoedon, via Twitter updated the crypto community on the situation, saying that a consensus problem unfortunately happened, which has led to a 3-way fork between Parity, Geth and another well-known Ethereum-based client. During the fork’s post-mortem, Afri Schoedon explained:

• Recently added hash power caused reduced block times and caused this hard fork to happen much earlier than expected on a Saturday which is, by all means, the worst time for a hard fork.
• Hard fork happened only 6 days after Geth release and 1 day after Parity release, users had not enough time to upgrade.
• There is no fork monitor available, only http://ropsten-stats.parity.io which does not reveal details about the different chains.

The Parity developer, having all these in mind, claimed that the upgrade shouldn’t be rushed by the Ethereum community. After the event, it was predicted that by mid-January, 16^thto be precise, the activation of Constantinople could take place. This has now been confirmed in a Core Developer meeting held recently. With the most recent bi-weekly call of the project, Ethereum Constantinople will be activated on processing of block 7,080,000, which will be available around 14^th January. Through the project’s most recent bi-weekly call, it has been confirmed that Ethereum Constantinople will activate on the processing of block 7,080,000, which is slated to arrive around January 14th, as revealed by CoinTelegraph as well as Etherscan statistics.