Ethereum Core Developers Are Looking At the Option Of Frequent & Smaller Hard Forks

The latest bi-weekly conference held among Ethereum coders indicate that they are looking at the option of implementing small hard forks often. Tim Beiko, the moderator at the meeting, raised the question of time gap between network upgrades, commonly referred to as hard forks. Another developer then started discussing by citing core developer Alexey Akhunov’s earlier stated stance in favor of short time span between forks.

To understand developers stance on hard fork timing, a query asking whether the developers will be prepared for a hard fork in three months. The initial three responses to the query were negative or cautiously optimistic, with one of the developer Joseph Delong commenting that three months was “too quick […] for turnaround.”

Martin Holst Swende, another programmer, summarized the overall sentiment by saying

“as long as we’re not tied to large hard forkes every three months. So, more like opportunity windows, when things are finished.”

Another coder highlighted the need to finish a hard fork in the next six month, proposing that “there a couple of things we probably need to automate to be able to do that really well.”
The programmers also pointed out that the subject has been earlier discussed on Ethereum Magicians, an Ethereum developer forum.

In the previous meeting Beiko had listed out the advantages and disadvantages of smaller and more recurring hard forks, revealing that the core team talked about the subject on developer call on the same day.

Some of the squabbles in approval of this initiative include implementing more regular updates to the protocol, allowing the team to segregate issues and insulate alterations better and reduce the time spent on updates which require several forks. In addition, the trial process is probably simpler since less EIPs are to be tested and far less EIP interactions are to be verified.

Nevertheless, concerns were also raised for bigger and much less common hard forks, such as leaving enough time for safety assessment. Moderate hard forks necessitate less regular user cooperation and client upgrades. For regular hard forks, a glitch in a fork may also postpone the upcoming fork.

A report published by DApp.com, the decentralized application analytics website, showed that Tron (TRX) blockchain has the rapidly growing DApp user base while Ethereum’s DApp user base declines. Charles Hoskinson, co-founder of Ethereum and IOHK, the startup backing Cardano (ADA), this week condemned the innovation strategy adopted by Ethereum and Eos (EOS).