Are Ethereum Nodes Ready for a New Hard Fork on New Year’s Day?

The Ethereum network is expected to undergo a scheduled upgrade,named Muir Glacier at block number 9,200,000, predicted to occur on New Year’s Day 2020.  

As Ethereum has faced the dilemma of moving to proof-of-stake in the usual way, delaying in the mining “ice age,” developers have voted to disable the difficulty time bomb for miners to be able to seek block rewards with the use of some time. 

The developers forgot to diffuse the difficulty creep during the Istanbul hard fork earlier this month, leaving exchange employees and node operators awake even after the New Year celebrations. 

Although the crypto markets may be quite inactive on New Year's Day, any mistakes with the hard fork may result in the worst day of the year for its recovery.  

Around 63.2% of nodes are ready for the changes, according to Ethernodes. 40% have been slightly changing their protocols, as the difficulty creep started to affect mining in the past three months, leading to a drop of around 20%.  

Ethereum prices have been falling since mining has become more difficult. Although the Istanbul hard fork faced a similar issue regarding readiness, most nodes left it to the last minute to update, although still resulting in passing the fork successfully. Unlike the Istanbul hard fork, nodes may get ready this time for the Muir Glacier hard fork. 

The developers from the Ethereum Foundation also confirmed that the hard fork would increase the inflation of Ethereum, resulting in a further decrease in the ETH price.  

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