фото показано с : bitcoinexchangeguide.com

Only a month following the Istanbul hard fork, the Ethereum blockchain completed the Muir Glacier hard fork on January 2nd, at block 9,200,000. The highly-publicized hard fork, which raised concerns of launching on New Years’, updated with one improvement on the proposal EIP 2384. The proposal delays the difficulty bomb (aka the ice age) for another 4,000,000 blocks.

The Jan. 2 2020 Muir Glacier update aims to delay the difficulty bomb or delay the ice age, an in-built mechanism that significantly increases the difficulty of mining blocks on Ethereum. During the Istanbul hard fork at the start of December 2019, the Ethereum developers missed accounting for the “ice age” hence the recent update.

The top Ethereum node clients including Geth and Parity have synced to the Muir Glacier update but one client is still syncing as at the time of writing. With all the clients running at block 9,201,536 at the moment, nethermind is running behind 1,537 blocks behind, yet to sync into the 9,200,000 block.

Over 93% of the nodes are ready and synced to the blockchain with 6.2% not ready including 170 nodes, 8 nodes, 5 nodes and 3 nodes on Geth, Parity Ethereum, Teth, and Multigeth respectively. Several exchanges have supported the hard fork including Binance, Coinbase, and Kraken. However, some exchanges are yet to offer information on their progress on the fork.

The update goes a long way to enable the network to smoothly transition from the proof of work (PoW) to proof of stake (PoS) mechanism in the upcoming Ethereum 2.0 platform.

Just 48 hours before the Muir Glacier update, several nodes complained their nodes were not syncing which led to an update on the client. The Parity developers warned users of a possible hack attempt urging users to update their clients before the fork.

The Muir Glacier update is a temporary solution as developers call for the abolishment of the difficulty bomb altogether.

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