Ethereum’s Mui Glacier Hard Fork Goes Live with 90 Percent Community Support

Smart contract platform Ethereum (ETH) has successfully implemented the Muir Glacier hard fork to delay the controversial “difficulty bomb” for another four million blocks, The Block reports, January 2, 2020.

Ethereum Mainnet Undergoes Muir Glacier Hard Fork

The second-largest digital currency project by market cap, Ethereum, has successfully completed the Muir Glacier upgrade. Notably, this upgrade comes less than a month after its highly-anticipated Constantinople update went live on December 8, 2019.

Per sources close to the matter, the Muir Glacier upgrade went live at block number 9,200,000 on January 2, 2020. The upgrade comprises only one Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP), namely, EIP 2384. The improvement proposal has only one function – to delay the Ethereum difficulty bomb.

For the uninitiated, the difficulty bomb is a built-in algorithm in the Ethereum network which, if left unchecked, can exponentially increase the difficulty in mining a new block. According to the report, the latest update will delay the difficulty bomb roughly for 611 days.

Interestingly, this is the third time that the difficulty bomb has been delayed by the blockchain network’s developers. Previously the bomb had been delayed in the years 2018 and 2019, respectively.

Blindsided

In a Medium post published on December 16, 2020, Ethereum developer Pooja Ranjan stated that the Mui Glacier update went live because of a miscalculation made during the Constantinople update. The post reads in part:

“The developer community initially estimated the difficulty bomb to become noticeable in mid-2020. However, instead, the bomb became noticeable in October, forcing the community to address the issue sooner than planned.”

Ranjan added that due to time crunch, the Ethereum community decided to move ahead with another difficulty bomb delay update rather than discuss at length the proposition to remove the algorithm altogether from the code.

At press time, major cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance, Kraken, and Bittrex have publicly extended support for the upgrade while other exchanges like Coinbase, Huobi, and Poloniex are yet to make their position clear.

Per data from Ethernodes, close to 90 percent of the community has decided to go ahead with the upgrade.