Why Ethereum Classic should adopt a treasury?

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Ethereum Classic Cooperative

3 min readJan 13, 2021

ETC Cooperative is supportive of the proposal for an Ethereum Classic Treasury to establish sustainable funding for independent teams to both maintain the core protocol and evolve the Ethereum Classic platform, as well as grant pools for wider community development. IOHK brought the Treasury proposal back on the table in ECIP-1098 and implementation of a treasury is live on the Sagano Ethereum Classic testnet. We’re writing this to substantiate our support for this proposal and hopefully answer some questions.

Blockchain protocols are complex systems that are expensive to research, develop, and to maintain in an increasingly competitive market. Ethereum Classic has been supported on the model of donation, benefactors, and no formal governance, but year after year ETC has struggled to have the incentives for developers to deliver to the ecosystem.

Client Diversification

A treasury would fund multiple core development teams to provide their respective clients. Different clients and different programming languages make the network stronger to target different features and audiences. More supported programming languages means broadening the accessibility for more developers to contribute and have the incentive to do so.

In the case of critical consensus failures and bugs, a supermajority client can be a single point of failure that cannot be afforded. ETC experienced this first hand when the Parity family of clients split from the network during a 51% attack because it had different parameters for handling reorganizations and did not have technical support to maintain ETC compatibility. Parity had a share of around 50% of nodes which as you can imagine — was basically half the network lost in space. Thankfully that’s been resolved, but multiple clients with solidified ETC support are absolutely crucial to public blockchain survivability.

Innovation and Competitiveness

Bitcoin was launched with Proof of Work (PoW) over a decade ago and within that decade has been revolutionary science to improve PoW protocols. E.i: Fly-clients, NiPoWPoW, coded Merkle-trees. Ethereum Classic can scale and out-perform Bitcoin and Ethereum by many-times-over while retaining PoW, code-is-law, and immutability. A treasury would provide the funding for such a roadmap which evidently makes the ecosystem more expensive and able to offer something novel and new to the market.

Inclusive Governance

A treasury with multiple core development teams inclusive of community voting would make sure no single entity can have a monopoly or franchise over the ecosystem. Of course, the community should have the power to remove and add members from the treasury. Eventually, the independent developers or anyone who has provided a successful proposal for that matter would be eligible to receive funding. I strongly believe that this should be phased out to include more and more people as time goes on.

Presentations

The treasury proposal is still an ongoing proposal, but you may find the relevant presentation informative:

Initial Polls

Thanks to the community manager a.s. for conducting these polls on Telegram, Twitter, and Reddit

References

ECIP 1098: Proto Treasury System https://ecips.ethereumclassic.org/ECIPs/ecip-1098