What is going on with Ethereum Classic? — May 2021 — Oped
Ethereum Classic has taken leaps in price action and soared in market cap sitting in the top 20 cryptocurrencies. Many are wondering what’s going on with Ethereum Classic? I’m assuming many readers are completely new to Ethereum Classic. Therefore, let’s briefly explain what Ethereum Classic is.
Quick History
Ethereum Classic (ETC) and Ethereum (ETH) are cousin blockchains that split during the contentious Ethereum DAO Hard Fork. TheDAO was meant to be a decentralized venture capital fund for Ethereum projects, but the crowd sale had more holes than swiss cheese, and investors got rekt. So, part of the community wanted to hard fork their money back, and they did! The chain that forked kept the Ethereum brand and ETH ticker symbol while the canonical chain rebranded to Ethereum Classic and the ETC ticker symbol.
ETC vs ETH
ETC is blessed to be a community with a lack of toxic maximalists. Instead, you’ll tend to find a lot of people who tend to enjoy Bitcoin’s take on money and Ethereum’s take on extended functionality.
Key similarities
- ETC and ETH technologies such as; tools, frameworks, smart contracts, and libraries are cross-compatible.
Key differences
- ETC is digitally scarce adopting a fixed supply monetary policy in 2017. Every 5 ml blocks the block reward is reduced by 20%.
- ETC intends to remain PoW and removed the Ethereum Ice Age mechanism which was intentionally designed to handicap Ethereum for PoS. There’s also work underway in ETC to change the PoW algorithm to Keccak (Sha-3) to become the apex predator in its respective PoW. Ethash was intentionally designed inefficiently to handicap the network for PoS after all!
- ETC is ETC, not ETH 1.0 or ETH 2.0.
Roadmap
So what’s coming for ETC in the near future? Well, there are a few high-impacting Ethereum Classic Improvement Proposals in development right now such as:
- An Ethereum Classic Proto-Treasury to funds multiple core development teams and community grants aimed at funding value and innovation for the ecosystem.
- Changing the PoW algorithm to Keccak-256 (Sha-3) to pursue a majority PoW algorithm and reclaim the security guarantees of Nakamoto-consensus.
- Checkpointing to temporarily disable attack vectors to a point a checkpoint is no longer needed. ETC is currently using MESS to reduce the chance of 51% attacks.
- ETC has been inclusive of ETH features which means you can expect the ETH Berlin feature set to come to ETC as well.
Learn more
https://ethereumclassic.netlify.app/ is the site for https://ethereumclassic.org but I’m providing both in case there’s still on-ongoing maintenance on the “.org” domain.
Disclaimer: Not financial advice or recommendation. This is an opinion article and not a reflection of my employer.
