The Ethereum Foundation announced that the next major network upgrade will take place on January 1st 2020, New Year’s Day.
Per an official blog post published on Monday, the Ethereum Foundation alerted developers and miners that the “Muir Glacier” upgrade is set to occur at 9.2 million blocks. The upgrade comes less than a month after Ethereum’s highly anticipated “Istanbul,” update, and marks a series of upgrades for the network as it transitions to Ethereum 2.0.
According to the official post:
The Ethereum network will be undergoing a scheduled upgrade at block number 9,200,000, which is predicted to occur on Wednesday, January 1, 2020. The exact date is subject to change due to variable block times and timezones.
A previous post about the upgrade revealed that Muir Glacier will serve to delay the planned increase in Ethereum’s mining difficulty by an estimated 611 days.
Ethereum Cat Herders said:
Once the difficulty increase of the difficulty bomb is too great for the block time retargeting mechanism, it results in an increase in block times for the network. This results in a degradation in the usability of Ethereum due to waiting for confirmation for transactions and Dapps as everything takes longer throughout the network.
Node operators and miners will be required to download the updated client software in order to be in compliance with the network.