The Ethereum (ETH) network has successfully completed another hard fork. Dubbed the Muir Glacier, this is the second hard fork implemented within one month.
The previous hard fork was the Istanbul upgrade which took place on Tuesday, the 7th of December. This second hard fork was not exactly supposed to happen yet. However, the Ethereum team realized that the estimated time for Ethereum’s difficulty bomb was wrong.
The difficulty bomb is a feature on the Ethereum network that adjusts the difficulty required to create a block. It is necessary for Ethereum’s proof-of-stake move.
Furthermore, the Muir Glacier upgrade was done at block 9,200,000, which was done at 8:30 UTC on Thursday, the 2nd of January. With the implementation of the new hard fork, the difficulty bomb problem has been solved.
The hard fork was initially put forward back in November by Ethereum contributor Eric Conner, in the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 2384. Now, the difficulty bomb as been pushed back by four million blocks. Also, this gives more than enough time for Ethereum to issue ETH 2.0.
At the time, Conner explained this saying that if the new upgrade was not done, transactions will become a little too expensive. This is because the time it will take to settle one block would rise to between 20 and 30 seconds. He added:
“This will start making the chain bloated and more costly to use. It’s best to delay the difficulty bomb again to around the time of expected launch of the Eth2 finality gadget.”
Image Credits: Pixabay
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