The history of ETC

Ethereum Classic history is one of the things that can’t be easily learned. The details about it are not put in one place which makes it very hard for new people joining the space to understand. I’ve decided to write a bit about it but I soon realized that I don’t know all the details. Since I’ve wanted it to have all the important information in one place, I’ve decided to make a Github repository where anyone can contribute.

I’ve divided ETC history into 4 chapters and here are their summaries:

Birth — The early days

1. Ethereum network launches
2. Soon after, a company named Slock.It deploys a smart contract that ends up holding 150 million dollars
3. A new exploit is found that can be used to empty a lot of contracts that follow bad practices
4. Slock.It CEO claims they are not vulnerable to this attack

Struggle — The DAO nightmare

1. There were two DAO hackers — along with the original DAO hacker there was a group of white hat hackers hacked the DAO by exploiting the same vulnerability as the original DAO hacker and later doing more damage to ETC than DAO hacker to this date
2. Ethereum decided to hard fork and bail out DAO investors based on a very poor voting result with 12-hour notice for voting
3. The DAO hard fork did not revert the transactions from the hacker. It deleted account balances from around 100 wallets and increased some other wallet balances, doing all that without private keys of the wallets which goes against everything blockchain fight for and breaks its most important rule You are your own bank
4. It seems that it was actually possible to rescue the hacked funds without the fork due to another vulnerability in the DAO contract that was known to at least some RHG members

Recovery — Showing signs of life

1. ETCDEV team gets founded
2. IOHK founds a team for ETC called team Grothendieck
3. ETC gets limited coin issuance and removes difficulty bomb
4. A bunch of events signaling recovery take place

Rise — Decentralized teams forming around it

1. ETCDEV expands on a total of 14 members and ships Emerald SDK, SputnikVM (performance optimized EVM) and starts working on sidechains
2. IOHK releases their long-awaited Mantis client and plans to bring NIPoPoWs to ETC chain
3. ETC Cooperative is founded and plans to supports ETC development and marketing
4. ETC Labs is founded and is an incubator for ETC projects

If you want to read the whole story (or contribute for that matter) you can do so here: ETC-History

In regards to recent events, I’d like to thank ETCDEV for all their contributions to the chain — I still silently hope they reunite at some point. Their departure will not be invisible but it will show what we mean by Decentralized teams forming. Enjoy the read.