As the Ethereum community debated a proposal to fork the network in order to unfreeze Ether tokens locked in some Parity wallets, developer Alex Van De Sande wrote a blog post arguing that any contentious hard fork would hurt the network. Along those lines, he advocates for finding a solution to the problem of the frozen tokens so that the parties which lost access to them are incentivized to continue supporting the current version of the Ethereum blockchain.
Much of the momentum behind EIP867[1] seems to have dissipated, but there is a continued push to restore access to funds that were frozen when a library contract that served certain Parity wallets was suicided[2].
What's New
On April 16, Parity's Afri Schoeden proposed EIP999[3], which would restore the contract code of the suicided contract through a hard fork, causing the frozen Ether tokens to become available once again. In the EIP, Schoeden noted that in contrast to "previously discussed proposals, this [patch] will not change any EVM semantics and tries to achieve the goal of unfreezing the funds by a single state transition."
Schoeden related that "after lengthy discussions," it was determined that hard fork-based fixes which involved adjustments to the Ethereum Virtual Machine protocol might trigger "unwanted side-effects."
He also explained that the EIP would introduce "backwards incompatibilities in the state of" the presently suicided contract, because the "Ethereum protocol does not allow the restoration of self-destructed contracts." Therefore, his proposal includes the following suggestion:
"To implement this [change] on the Ethereum blockchain, it is recommended to add the necessary state transition in a future hard-fork at a well-defined block number, e.g., CNSTNTNPL_FORK_BLKNUM for the Constantinople milestone
