Ethereum Core Developers Move Forward With ProgPOW Update

Ethereum core developers are going forward with ProgPOW which is an update for making Ether mining more ASIC resistant so the hardfork is scheduled for July this year. Let’s read more about it in the following Ethereum news today.

The Ethereum core developers came to a conclusion that they have to implement ProgPOW and the hardfork is scheduled to happen three weeks after the EIP 1962 which is another update that will add more cryptographic functions to Ethereum. The update is scheduled to go live sometime this summer.

This is actually a third time that the core developers have agreed to implement ProgPOW so the core developers seem to be keen on improvement despite the fact that there have been a few developers at unease with a chance of splitting the community. The developers believe that the hardfork for ProgPOW is contentious and some have even raised concerns that the exchanges that run on Ethereum with both the new and old mining algorithm will create a new fork on Ethereum to maximize the fees on the platforms which will lead to a split in the community.

 “I have not seen any evidence that there is an ideological or people willing to step up and actually have a network split. If I’m wrong I’ll resign as hardfork coordinator.’’

Ethereum split once before with the ‘’DAO’’ which was the first attempt to a so called decentralized autonomous organization where more than 3.6 million ETH was exploited. Core developers decided to refund the affected users and the dissenters later formed Ethereum Classic in response. At least two projects were opposed to ProgPOW including SpanChain and the Gnosis projects. The executives of the projects were invited to voice their concerns about the next core developer meeting but this will likely won’t change the decision of the team:

“There will be plenty of time for open dissent that won’t really change the decision, necessarily, because we’ve already gone back and forth and approved it twice.”

ASIC resistance was a core consideration for Ethereum and the first version of the whitepaper explained how the distribution process of Ethereum will be performed through easily-accessible computer hardware which was more favorable for the community and the decentralization of the token. The leading mining hardware firm Bitmain developed an Ethereum ASIC in 2018 and in 2019 Canaan released an ASIC that was 5 times more efficient than comparable consumer hardware.