Constantinople is a planned Hard Fork of Ethereum and has run into issues during its testing phase. The hard fork cannot reach consensus and caused a testnet to be unusable, according to a tweet from Ethereum blockchain infrastructure firm Informa on October 13th.

The firm Informa also tweeted that developers should use another testnet while Ethereum developers investigate the current issue. The testings, on the Ropsten testnet, became active on October 13th at block 4,230,753, according to several statements. However, the testing has reported a consensus issue on Ropsten, which have led to several statements on Twitter. Developer Afri Schoedon states there will be no Constantinople during 2018 and that they need to investigate the issue.

The statements led to several question marks and users wondered how they could make these statements without investigating. To clarify, developer Afri stated on October 14th that the core developers have agreed that they would not be able to activate Constantinople this year if there are any major issues on the testnet Ropsten. The developers will have a new call on the topic on Friday, the 19th. He ends his tweet by telling the community to stay tuned until then for more information.

The Co-founder, Galano, of Informa stated that no fix was found yet and that the developers were working hard over the weekend to find the problem, and seem to be near a solution. He added a link to Gitter.im, where you can follow the discussion between the core developers.

Around three months ago, Toshi Times covered the story that developers began testings for Constantinople. The intention with the upgrade was to increased efficiency and lower fees across the network. The Constantinople upgrade is the second phase of upgrades for the Ethereum network, which is following on from the Byzantium phase, activated last October. It will make some optimisations which rather notably, will lower transaction fees.

Constantinople includes five different Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs). Once released on Ethereum, the proposals will permanently alter the blockchain with a host of new backwards-incompatible upgrades. It means that nodes, the network of computers, that run the Ethereum software must either update together with the whole system or continue running as a separate blockchain entity. Characterised as primarily a “maintenance and optimisation upgrade” by Rettig, Constantinople features small, yet highly technical.

Ethereum is the second biggest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation according to Coinmarketcap.com. However, Ethereum has taken a huge beating the past months and has fallen from its high of around 1 400 dollars to today’s price around 200 dollars. That reflects a “crash” of 85 percents.