Mystique Hard Fork Is Coming—February 13th, 2022

ETC Cooperative
Ethereum Classic Cooperative
2 min readJan 28, 2022

With ECIP-1104 quickly approaching, we are currently reaching out to all node operators and service providers to raise awareness of the upgrade to the network.

The Mystique hard-fork will be activated on the Ethereum Classic mainnet at block 14,525,000 which is estimated to occur on Feb 13th, 2022. This is not a contentious hard-fork, just a routine protocol upgrade.

It is anticipated that all the major pools, exchanges, wallets and other services are ready or are actively preparing for Mystique. Outreach is ongoing, but service providers are also encouraged to publicly signal their readiness to the public in whatever way makes most sense for them.

Adoption across publicly visible ETC nodes can be tracked on this dashboard by looking at the percentage of nodes for which ForkId (Next) = Mystique:

° ETC Node Explorer

At the time of writing (January 27th), there is 35% readiness. The historic adoption pattern has seen a spike in readiness close to the activation block, following slow and steady increases in earlier weeks. It is not unusual for total readiness to only hit 60–70% by the activation block. That is not problematic as long as the economically important nodes (primarily those run by mining pools and exchanges) are updated in time. If other node operators do not upgrade then they get stranded on the old chain, but that does not harm anybody but themselves. When they upgrade their own nodes, they will be back on the right chain.

Clients supporting Mystique hard-fork?

The following client releases contain Mystique support. All node operators are encouraged to upgrade as soon as possible.

If you are using a managed API service or third-party service provider, then please ensure they are ready for Mystique. The more people who ask, the more likely a provider is to make a public statement confirming their readiness.

What is the Mystique hard-fork?

Mystique is a hard-fork bringing a subset of the EIPs which are part of Ethereum’s London hard-fork across into Ethereum Classic. The hard-fork is specified in ECIP-1104 (Mystique EVM and Protocol Upgrades).

Included:

Excluded:

The fee market change and associated BASEFEE opcode are undesirable for ETC because they conflict with the fixed monetary policy. The difficulty bomb delay is not applicable because ETC has already removed the difficulty bomb entirely.

See you on the other side!

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(Original blog post by Bob Summerwill found on ETC Co-op website here.)

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ETC Cooperative
Ethereum Classic Cooperative

The Ethereum Classic Cooperative is a non-profit organization created to accelerate the growth and adoption of the Ethereum Classic network.