Ethereum has big plans to address scaling issues, a transition to Proof-of-Stake, and essentially upgrade to ETH 2.0. Meanwhile, the often-overlooked Ethereum Classic appears to have big plans of its own, like perhaps taking over from ETH 1.0. Some have even suggested that this was the plan from the start.
From The Domain Of Ethereum Purists…
Ethereum Classic emerged in 2016 following a contentious hard fork of the ETH network. The forking majority supported a rollback of the Ethereum blockchain, to reverse the damage done by a major hack on the DAO project.
A minority of purists opposed this rollback as being against everything that blockchain immutability stood for. Thus, Ethereum Classic was born, building on the original blockchain.
And there it might have stayed, as a curio, existing for conservative blockchainers and die-hard Ethereum purists. If that is, ETH hadn’t since undergone so much development as to change beyond recognition.
To Flavour Of The Month?
The roadmap to ETH 2.0 was unveiled exactly a year ago, bringing ‘advances’ such as sharding and a transition to Proof-of-Stake.
Meanwhile, Ethereum Classic developers have been slowly implementing the upgrades which will take the cryptocurrency to the pre-ETH 2.0 state. Whilst the ETH 2.0 upgrade is likely to make its own version of ETH 1.0 redundant, Ethereum Classic is positioning itself to step into the gap.
Some think ETC might even seek to remerge the chains and keep all of the Decentralised Finance (DeFi) apps alive. This might not be as outlandish a suggestion as it seems.
In addition, Binance has certainly thrown some weight behind Ethereum Classic in recent weeks, as ETC has been present in all three phases of its crypto-lending product.
One satirical observer even suggested that this had been the plan from the start, and the DAO hack was an inside job to deliberately create a ‘conservative’ backup version of the ‘progressive’ ETH 2.0?
Okay, so it was clearly a joke, but us crypto-kids do love a good conspiracy theory.
What does the future hold for Ethereum Classic? Let us know in the comments below.
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