It will indeed be a good year for the Ethereum Classic community, as the ETC cooperative recently made some positive announcements for the coming year of the protocol.
The ETC Cooperative, which is a public charity focused on supporting the development and growth of Ethereum Classic, will be funding the development work on the Core-Geth client from next month, according to a recent announcement.
The Core-Geth client is an Ethereum protocol provider that allows users to run Ethereum Classic, Ethereum, and associated test networks using the Go programming language. Geth is the primary client maintained by the Ethereum network and is used by the majority of its user base.
ETC Coop’s announcement noted that ETC developers Isaac Ardis and Christos Ziogas have signed new agreements with the entity but will continue working under the ETC Core Team. The team will also include Diego López León. Incidentally, he has been working with ETC Coop since September to develop the Hyperledger Besu client, another top protocol provider for ETC.
ETC’s core team will now continue development work for these two clients, as well as additional projects over time, ETC Coop said. “The recent narrow focus on the Core-Geth client is not representative of the history of the team,” he added.
The Core developers Team has been an important part of the ETC protocol since it forked from the Ethereum network, and has been instrumental in supporting previous Geth clients before the Core-Geth was introduced in 2020.
The Core-Geth client is a fork of the Go Ethereum client and is the main node of the network. It has a 94.5% dominance over Hyperledger Besu, which dominates the remaining 5.5% of nodes in the network. Core-Geth was once funded by Ethereum Classic Labs and will now move to the ETC.
The constant development of ETC clients is monumental to the network, as they play a key role in maintaining the security of the network. The Ethereum protocol had recently skirted a catastrophic hard fork, reminiscent of the one that created ETC in 2016, due to a bug found in the Geth client, which has been deployed by over 50% of ETH users.
ETC was not so lucky, however, as it also suffered an exploit due to the same bug, causing an unforeseen hard fork of the network in September. While this did not turn out to be a major concern at the time, a negative effect on hash rate and issue rates indicated a cause for future concern.
