It’s another day, another upgrade for Ethereum as the world’s largest smart contracts platform has just rolled out a new major update.
Called “Gray Glacier,” the upgrade occurred at block 15,050,000 on June 30 with the sole goal of introducing changes to the parameters of the network’s difficulty bomb, pushing it back by 700,000 blocks, or roughly 100 days.
The Gray Glacier upgrade is the network’s hard fork, which means it is creating new rules to improve the system and requires the node operators and miners to download the latest version of their Ethereum clients.
“If you are using an Ethereum client that is not updated to the latest version, […] your client will sync to the pre-fork blockchain once the upgrade occurs,” the Ethereum Foundation said in a blog post earlier this month.
In other words, the non-upgraded clients are stuck on an incompatible chain following the old rules, meaning that operators won’t be able to send transactions or operate on the post-upgrade Ethereum network.
What's more, not all node operators and miners followed the recommendation though, as data from Ethernodes shows that only 65% of clients were fully prepared for the Gray Glacier upgrade.
Erigon, the network’s second-largest client, was the only one to have all of its 164 clients upgraded.
Geth, the network’s most popular client, was only 67% ready, with as many as 448 clients running the outdated software. Nethermind and Besu had 76% and 78% of its clients updated, respectively.
