Exchanges, miners, developers, users and ethereum’s entire ecosystem is getting ready for a historical and defining hardfork.
Kraken, eth’s biggest exchange after Polonix, announced traders will be offered only one option, eth on the longest chain. If other exchanges follow Kraken’s example, which is likely, a chain split is practically impossible save for, at worst, a couple of hours.
The announcement was preceded by a public statement from Christoph Jentzsch, one of the founders of the DAO, who detailed the hardfork specifications. All DAO tokens, whether in white or dark DAO, child or main DAO, innocent or not innocent split, will be frozen and sent to a new contract address where DAO token holders will be able to withdraw their share. The extrabalance will be sent to a multisig controlled by DAO curators who will then return the extra eth paid during the “creation” stage to their rightful owners.
The code, too, is pretty much ready according to Péter Szilágyi, Software Developer at Ethereum Foundation and one of the main developers of the hardfork code. Speaking to CCN, he states that all tests and reviews are pretty much done:
I’ve even written a cross-client network simulator to do some full fledged fork emulation and see if the network behaves properly… Results? Geth behaves correctly.
Ethereum’s hardfork pull request will probably be merged today or early tomorrow with the Geth client, used by some 99% of ethereum’s 7186 nodes, most likely defaulting in favor of the hardfork.
Miners now too are getting ready with preliminary results showing support for the fork. The just announced vote will probably last another day or two, with Ethpool and Ethermine likely upgrading to the fork client on Sunday or Monday if the miners continue to signal in favor of the fork. Other pools will probably do likewise around the 17th-18th with the fork itself being a flag day on the 20th of July 2016, just a day before the deadline of 21st July.
More than 7,000 node operators will likewise have to upgrade if they wish to continue using their node. Failure to upgrade for ordinary nodes is insignificant in any event as far as the network is concerned and as far as node operators are concerned if they are not transacting through their non-upgraded node. Businesses will, of course, probably upgrade within hours of the client release.
The hardfork, therefore, is now in motion with the entire ecosystem focused on this historical event. If it goes smoothly, one can expect a renewed trust in the entire cryptocurrency space from ordinary men and women, corporations and regulators who may take the view that we should be given the space to experiment and self-regulate as the world is shown that decentralized consensus works in good times and when things go wrong.
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