No “Emergency Hard Fork”: Parity Aims to Resolve Frozen $150 Million in Ethereum Constantinople Upgrade in 2018

Parity Technologies is not currently pushing for an emergency hard fork to recover hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ETH that was frozen due to a code vulnerability.

Just days after a developer “accidentally” deleted a section of Parity wallet code, Afri Schoedon, head of technical communications at Parity, said the issue could be fixed later, possibly as part of ethereum’s planned upgrade, Constantinople, expected in 2018.

A statement said that the incident resulted in a total of up to $152 million worth of ETH being frozen - some of which belonged to corporate and customer funds of some well-known ICO issuers, making the owners of these ETH unable to access these funds. However, this points to the more controversial hard forks, which some people believe are emergency hard forks (like the one executed after the The DAO vulnerability incident last year) are a corporate "contingency measure."

Although stakeholders have said that a hard fork would be required to recover the frozen funds, Schoedon told CoinDesk that Parity has “plenty of time” to find a solution that “has the support of a large portion of the community.”

Expanding on Schoedon’s comments, Nick Johnson, an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) developer at the Ethereum Foundation, expressed his own view, saying, “There is absolutely no need to rush. Unlike the DAO situation, there are no time limits and no funds are at risk, they are just locked up. The community has plenty of time to decide what to do.”

The Parity team is drafting a proposal, but it is unclear when it will be published. According to Schoedon, Parity will not have to promote "contingency measures" and will focus on finding a solution that is widely accepted by the community and can take care of the entire Ethereum network.

Schoedon continued:

“I hope that no one is actually denying… the projects that were affected and wanting users to recover their locked funds. However, if the current situation and discussion were not so contentious, we would be more than happy to provide the option for users to choose whether they would like Constantinople to include or exclude the proposals being discussed.”