Ethereum developers have announced that the proposed Constantinople hard fork planned for November is postponed until 2019. The meeting held on Friday October 19 had the developers decide on the new date due to some technical issues noticed during the testnet.

This essentially is the preparatory testing of the simulated version of the blockchain in which the users get a feel of the platform without paying for gas fees.

The October 13 trial of the Constantinople would have enabled the project come live on the network by early November. The new date was reached after an hour-long meeting of the developers with the January date selected for the launch.

The Constantinople hard fork according to one of the developers is controversial due to the term used. The opinion was that it should be named an “update” instead of a “hard fork”.

The community usually views hard forks as a split that results in the formation of two distinct blockchains that have two communities such as Ethereum hard fork that resulted in Ethereum Classic and Ethereum during the ideological squabble of the DAO hack.

According to Alfri Schoeden and Ethereum developer, the reason for rescheduling of the Constantinople was the formation of a “three way fork” between two Ethereum clients, Berth and Parity.

The testnet ran into a number of hiccups during its debut on Ropsten on October 13. The network was stalled at block 4,299,999 a block short of activation at block 4,230,000.

The release of the developers meeting by Schoeden stated,

“recently added hashpower caused reduced blocktimes and caused this hard fork to happen much earlier than expected on a Saturday,” which he said was “by all means the worst time for a hard fork.”

It is not yet clear if the latest update of the Geth client which was released just six day before the hard fork contributed to the stalled testnet. Schoeden however pointed out the fact that aside Beth, Parity’s latest update was just a day to the testnet.

According to him, users did not really have enough time to upgrade. Furthermore, developers discovered a consensus bug in Parity according to another report from the developers.

It was reported that no user was mining the Constantinople chain during the commencement of the testnet. This led to a two-hour delay before the commencement of the processing of the block 4,230,000.

Another developer Hudson Jameson proposed that,

“a temporary mining of the Constantinople on a baby testnet prior to the main test.”

It is now apparent that the developers will have to go back to work to ensure that the hard fork is accomplished by early 2019.