The Ethereum network has conducted the Muir Glacier hard fork at block number 9,200,000 on January 2 2020, making it Ethereum’s first hard fork in 2020.
Ethereum Muir Glacier hard fork
The hard fork has received mixed feedback as some exchanges have supported it while others have not expressed their stance on the matter.
The hard fork was conducted for just reason that is; to fix the mistake committed in Istanbul hard fork. Thus, the fork had only one Ethereum Improvement Proposal, EIP 2384 that was to delay the difficulty bomb.
As Cryptopolitan previously mentioned, the Ethereum network has a difficulty bomb known as Ethereum’s Ice Age that adjusts block mining difficulty every 100,000 blocks. This feature is delayed every time a hard fork is conducted to enable users to adjust with the fork and prevents it from congesting.
In the Istanbul hard fork, developers forgot to delay the ICE Age feature that caused the network to suffer congestion as users found it hard to keep up with the block difficulty. Increased block difficulty increased the time needed to mine one Ethereum block and caused the network to slow down.
Muir Glacier has now delayed the feature for another 4,000,000 blocks that would take approximately 611 days to be mined.
Ethereum Cat Herders claimed that during the Istanbul hard fork, it was estimated that the difficulty “bomb would no be noticeable until mid-2020.”
As such, the developing team believed that the bomb could be delayed in the next upgrade after Istanbul. However, the estimations proved incorrect as the bomb caused issues in the next few days after the fork.
Muir Glacier was supported by exchanges including Binance, Kraken, Bittrex and Bitso while Coinbase, Bithumb, Huobi and Bitfinex did not express their stance regarding the fork.
Regardless, the fork is in effect, and SparkPool has become the first to mine Muir Glacier by mining its fork block. He was congratulated by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
Featured image by Pixabay
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