The trail partners of Ethereum and Ethereum Classic will split soon, thanks to the recent success of the hard fork "Phoenix". Performed at block 10.500.839 on May 31, the network update incompatible with previous versions makes Ethereum Classic fully compatible with Ethereum.
The hard fork represents an important starting point for Ethereum Classic, which will rely on a Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanism while its twin chain will move on to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and sharding.
A path that becomes increasingly clear
In a sense, the PoS versus PoW division reflects the substantial disagreement that led to the creation of Ethereum Classic. The conflicting interpretations of a well-known 2016 hack led to a controversial fork that split a development field in two.
Since then, Ethereum Classic has been keeping up with Ethereum, but from now on it will stick to the already tested project, ETC Labs CEO Terry Culver said in an interview. Phoenix represents the third hard fork performed on Ethereum Classic in the last year, preceded by Agharta and Atlantis, which have increased interoperability between the two chains.
The latest hard fork integrated some Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP) compared to the previous Ethereum Istanbul hard fork, made in December 2019. Among these proposals, the developers of Ethereum Classic have focused mainly on addressing the various gas constraints in the of the Ethereum Classic Improvement Proposal (ECIP) 1088.
In both Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, gas constraints are periodically developed based on the needs of the network. Called in the "gwei" subunit, gas is a commission paid to the network for executing a user's transactions.
modularity
Interchain modularity, Culver said, puts the ETC community in a "position to drive innovation." To this end, ETC Labs is carrying out projects on stateless clients and decentralized storage - "universal challenges that everyone faces," he added.
Technical updates on the existing Ethereum to improve its will also continue quotation. Called Eth 1.x, the PoW-based Ethereum chain will continue to perform hard forks - including one in late summer known as "Berlin" - until it connects with Eth 2.0.
Ethereum Classic will act as a base level within the Ethereum ecosystem itself, said ETC Cooperative executive director Bob Summerwill. Ethereum and Ethereum Classic would live next to each other - and therefore would support similar offers, such as corporate blockchain tools or decentralized finance dapp (DeFi) - but ETC would offer a proven mechanism to support those applications with PoW.
Summerwill sees the need for an alternative, or many alternatives, to Eth 2.0's scaling solution that focuses on PoS and sharding, a database efficiency technique. Furthermore, he said that most dapps will likely want to run on a second tier of the Ethereum or Ethereum Classic blockchain. “The entry level model that we know how to work is Proof-of-Work. You can't get it to level 1, but maybe that's okay, ”Summerwill said.
