Ethereum classic developers announce in a public call Thursday that they will be realizing a system-wide upgrade, or hard fork, to the blockchain’s main network in September.
Dubbed as the Atlantis upgrade, the targeted block number for activation is 8,772,000 that shall seemingly hit at roughly 12:00 UTC on Sept. 17. Following a disagreement in May over the contents of the Atlantis upgrade, the developers have decided upon 10 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) that are set for inclusion in the upgrade on last Thursday.
In what will be the network’s first hard fork in over a year, Atlantis will be paired with an upgrade dubbed as Agharta in order to boost chain interoperability between the ethereum classic and ethereum networks. Back in 2017, the network started with a bundle of EIPs that activated on the ethereum blockchain.
Atlantis will mark the first step towards ensuring the migration of decentralized applications (dapps) from either chain is smooth and seamless. Although the decision hard fork activation date in mid-September was not reached without a fair amount of controversy and debate between developers.
One of the most infamous and long-running competitors to the ethereum blockchain, Ethereum classic was created in 2016. Basically, the ethereum classic is a version of the ethereum blockchain that did not restore stolen funds back to users after the major code exploits in the DAO, now a defunct smart-contract-based funding vehicle.
Though the ethereum classic didn’t match the near $30 billion valuations of the ethereum blockchain, one of the top 20 performing cryptocurrencies in the world by market capitalization. Notably, ethereum classic developers are currently working towards updating a network that will resemble a feature to mimic the ethereum blockchain closely.
Ethereum Classic Labs, the San Francisco-based startup elaborates their intentions in a blog post earlier this month about implementing Atlantis on the ethereum classic mainnet by July 1 instead of the previously agreed upon activation date for September. Ethereum Classic Labs is the most popular software client implementation of ethereum classic, dubbed as Classic Geth.
As for the announcement of a hard fork activation on July 1, was reportedly pushed due to a strong sentiment from miners and cryptocurrency exchanges in Asia that did not want Atlantis to upgrade sooner than September.
Christian Xu, Asia community manager for the Ethereum Classic Cooperative, stated during a developer call on Thursday.
“People in Asia are eager for this hard fork. In each of our articles, we say that Atlantis will happen on July 1. We did a lot of meetups around cities in China. Even more than 20 cities, we have visited.”
As for the communication that went out for a July 1 hard fork, the developers reached consensus that same day to speed-up testing for the Atlantis upgrade. Taking into account a faster testing timeline, community members noted that mainnet activation of the upgrade could also be bumped up and executed a month earlier than originally planned.
Although, other community members including, Tang and Roy Zou, the founder of blockchain research startup Gödel Labs have since then accused Xu of falsifying claims about the ethereum classic community in Asia. Tang stated:
“We asked them about Atlantis. We got the normal ‘don’t care’ response. But several exchanges/miners also said that they’re not aware of this before. That makes me feel suspicious.”
Tang and Zou insist that there’s no pressure from the ethereum classic Asia community for speeding up a hard fork activation date, XU maintains support is unrelenting for a faster launch date in August. Members of Ethereum Classic Labs, including CEO Terry Culver, last week showed resistant to the idea of delaying an August activation of Atlantis.
Culver said on the call last Thursday.
“I strongly disagree. We can’t subscribe to that schedule. We stick to the schedule that we originally agreed upon.”
Culver and the broader Ethereum Classic Labs team have around to the idea since then after discussing with the community. Yesterday, the team released a public blog post to affirm the new hard fork roadmap. The blog post reads:
“We look forward to our continued cooperation with the ETC community. ETC Labs will work jointly with all developers and teams to successfully complete the hard fork, making ETC stronger.”
Now with rough consensus from the entire ethereuem classic community, today’s call affirmed the official “accepted” status of the Atlantis hard fork and its delayed mainnet activation date to mid-September.
“We can move forward with [Atlantis] then and start preparing clients,” concluded ethereum classic developer “soc1c” .
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Image Source – Stock Photo Secrets
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