Ethereum Soft Fork Voting Commences

Several major Ethereum mining pools, namely, Dwarfpool, Ethpool and Ethremine, have launched a voting system enabling miners to express their views on The DAO’s soft fork.

Last week, miners have agreed in advance to implement the soft fork so that the community could continue discussing alternate options instead of a hard fork. On Friday, the soft fork’s release (updated Geth 1.4.8) dubbed DAO Wars was published on GitHub. The team also released Parity 1.2.0, so now the final decision is up to the miners.

Parity is out – https://t.co/kgcCHuM2Ry and supports the temporary soft fork by default! Good job #ethcore pic.twitter.com/5JR50uYfqQ

— slock.it (@slockitproject) June 24, 2016

According to PĂ©ter Szilágyi, Ethereum developer, in case Ethereum’s soft forking is endorsed, all child DAO assets will be suspended. They will remain accessible only to a selected group of people. Owners may have their coins back once the voting on hard fork occurs.

“This is understandably undesired for all legitimately split DAOs. As such – if the community votes to enact the soft-fork – we propose a follow up patch to the soft-fork that will whitelist all DAOs split according to the intent upheld by the enacted soft-fork,” Szilágyi added.

Important! – Geth 1.4.8 is out! https://t.co/6jjp2N35Jp – Miners should run with –dao-soft-fork pic.twitter.com/fnNb8QFhzd

— slock.it (@slockitproject) June 24, 2016

The miners who support the soft fork have to launch the update stating dao-soft-fork. The command will decrease gas limit for a block. Apart from the mandatory condition of at most 4 million ETH tokens as a fuel, the soft fork will be implemented only if at least 51% of Ethereum network’s aggregate hash rate votes in its favor.

If the soft fork fails to be endorsed, miners may launch the updated Geth client without specifying any additional commands, or do nothing.

The voting is expected to end on June 30, when block #1,800,000 will be found.

As of June 27, miners incline towards the soft fork solution, as one may see from the figure below. However, it’s worth mentioning that most of the miners haven’t voted so far.

Data according to Etherscan

Voting results for separate pools are available at official websites of Dwarfpool, Ethpool, and Ethermine.