The Ethereum Hard Fork and Infura

On October 18th at around 1:20pm UTC, the Ethereum network arrived at consensus for block 2,463,000. For all network participants using the latest client releases of the go-ethereum client, the Parity client and the Ethereum(J) client, the EIP150 1b/1c HardFork went into effect.

With this hard fork, the ongoing attacks that have been thwarting the network for a month appear to have come to an end. At Infura, we fully support the fork and look forward to returning to a stable network where we can develop and build solutions without this particular distraction. While we certainly don’t think this will be the last, for now at least, it appears to have restored order to the Ethereum mainnet.

The markets seem to agree that the fork is a positive influence as the price of ETH jumped as much as 7% on the day.

So, in a post-fork world, as always if you are running your own Ethereum node, you will want to be sure you are participating on the blockchain that you intend to be. If you are running a node locally, and you had NOT upgraded to one of the latest clients by block 2,463,000, you are not on the main Ethereum chain. Even if you do upgrade the client you would need to re-sync the entire chain so that you are certain you followed the right chain at the fork in the road. We experienced this on the testnet for Infura (morden.infura.io), so if you have any questions about what you might be seeing on your individual node please reach out and we can share our experience.

The Ethereum clients you need to be running so that you are on the right side of the fork (assuming you believe the fork is the right side) are:

go-ethereum v1.4.18

Parity 1.3.8

These two teams are unbelievable in their ability to deliver and we applaud their hard work. The go-ethereum team has named this latest release ‘Note 7’ showing that even after a month of sleepless nights they still haven’t lost their sense of humor and seem to be having fun along this wild ride.

So while these teams did all the heavy lifting, Infura stood by on the ready to deliver our service to the community. Lots of eyes were on the fork as it approached and went by without any issues. Our new friends at CodeTract wrote a countdown timer that included Infura as one of their sources of truth. Incoming requests to Infura spiked to an all-time peak over 2,000 request/sec. Almost all of which were JSON-RPC calls to the eth_blockNumber method as everyone anxiously watched the blocks come and go around the fork.

Now, as the dust settles and we prepare for the second EIP158 State Clearing HardFork we look forward to a bit of stability allowing us to focus on our roadmap of building out Infura features within Ferryman including smart routing to specific clients, caching, early-warning monitoring and auto-routing to healthy nodes and rich analytics.