Clarification: Reasons for Our Actions

Some people in the ETC community have expressed concern about the recent administrative changes to the “ethereumproject” GitHub account. A few individuals have maliciously distorted the facts and misled the community claiming that the changes were the result of a “hack.” We would like to take this opportunity to make the following clarifications.

“Ethereumproject” is the GitHub account owned by ETC Labs under the name “Krykoder.” We became the owner through a legitimate and compliant process. The removal of other owners was also legitimate and conforms to the Term of Service of GitHub, as confirmed by GitHub and hence, the “hack” is an utter lie.

The ETCDev team, led by Mr. Igor Artomonov, was an excellent group of developers who helped ETC grow after the DAO. However, ETC’s overall ecosystem lags way behind, and the gap between ETC and its competitors has grown wider. For example, there are no explorers for ETC testnet, no well-functioning wallets, or backward solidarity, and the number of DAPPs on the ETC chain is far lower than other chains. We suggested developing an ETC testnet explorer. We proposed enriching the API by adding the `status` field in Transaction Receipt, which would be very useful for application developers. We also suggested implementing track functionality for smart contract internal transactions, adding more EVM opcode like REVERT, and supporting the latest version of Solidity, among others. Unfortunately, our ideas were not welcome.

During the past year, ETC Labs has fully supported ETCDEV, ECC and other parts of the ecosystem. However, we are sorry to have discovered some fatal flaws such as: some people only care about their own status and power in the community instead of the future of ETC, some of the most vocal people take no action, and different parties lack cooperation. All these have contributed to ETC’s lack of development.

Previously, the Ethereumproject Github account had 3 other owners besides Igor. According to Igor, Cody Burns was the only active one among them. But Cody has hardly made any contributions to the core code of ETC on GitHub, nor has he provided any constructive advice. Such people take on an important position but fail to advance the project, while rejecting new ideas and systems. As we all know, there are no standardized and transparent procedures for ECIP, so Cody and Igor actually formed a highly-centralized decision-making system. As a result, hundreds of brilliant ideas are rejected and wasted. If this situation doesn’t change, if ETC still lacks competition, vigor, and practical work, its future is sure to be compromised!

We could have accepted the status quo easily: managing ETC Labs, cooperating with ECC and supporting ETCDEV, but crucial times require crucial measures, and some people must break the shackle and push forward a revolution, which is destined to break old patterns and dislodge vested interest groups. We are aware that removing other owners would bring criticism and misunderstanding, but we’re determined and willing to shoulder that, because it’s truly a “now or never situation.” Also, we fear nothing because we are truly and fully committed to the future of ETC, and we have absolutely zero malicious intentions. Our goal is to revolutionize the ETC community and to inject competition, vigor and democracy into the ecosystem.

But while we were busy discussing the detailed future plans for ETC, we were questioned, criticized and insulted. While that is unfair to people who have done real work, this has further strengthened our determination to push forward the revolution! We solemnly reiterate: ETC Labs and krykoder have absolutely no intention to be the only owner of the account. Multiple appropriate owners will be added to manage the resources in a democratic and decentralized manner, and this will happen soon enough!

We also noticed the revolution has begun to take effect. Some people are becoming busy, and we hope they are busy doing the right thing for ETC. Our congratulations to Mr. Cody for becoming the owner of the ‘new’ repo as he wished, and we hope the new repo does well, for the sake of ETC.

That’s all we want to explain.

Last but not least, we’re more than happy to spend time on advancing the real work of building ETC, not talking the big talk.