Ethereum's Next Upgrade Could Be the $29 Billion Blockchain's Biggest Test Yet

Still, in a upcoming October upgrade named Constantinople, ethereum is faced with a unique challenge - how to find a balance between a web of diverse stakeholders, each battling for different outcomes.

If no action is taken, the difficulty bomb will push ethereum into what is known as the "Ice age," a period wherein the difficulty is so high that transactions can no longer be processed, making the blockchain unusable.

Because delaying the difficulty bomb also impacts ether inflation, ethereum is under pressure to upgrade its code before the bomb hits.

With a total of four ethereum improvement proposals currently under discussion, many are arguing that in delaying the difficulty bomb, Constantinope should also reduce the amount of ether that is currently paid out to miners, the entities that run specialty computing hardware to secure transactions.

In a blog post published Monday, CTO of a mining startup named Atlantic Crypto, Brian Venturo, warned that "The security of the ethereum network is NOT something to compromise over." He championed EIP 1295 as the only proposal that doesn't potentially lower security.

"Fun fact! In the past 365 days, the ethereum network has paid $6.6 [billion] to miners," Conner tweeted.

Adding to the criticism is that founder of ethereum Vitalik Buterin has pushed back against EIP 1295, writing on Github that it could result in the further centralization of mining pools.

Still, there's way in which existing ethereum code could actually help protect the network when it comes to splits.

Due to the presence of the difficulty bomb, an ethereum researcher named Andrew Bradley said opportunistic fork attempts without developer support are unlikely to win out.

"We've had a lot of community enthusiasm for the forks," Hudson Jameson, a communications officer for the Ethereum Foundation, told CoinDesk, "It's weird hearing about people watching and participating in discussion around the bi-weekly core developer calls."