One of the largest Ethereum Classic clients, OpenEthereum, has made the decision to withdraw support for the project, resulting in around 69% of the network's nodes losing software support.
La the decision taken by OpenEthereum, a major Clients from the original network of Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, is due to the loss of immutability that the project suffered when several smart contracts (smart contracts) were altered. The problem originated as a result of the new update that Ethereum Classic launched at the beginning of June, known as Phoenix, which sought to achieve parity with the blockchain of Ethereum, but introduced changes to the internal structure of the network's ETC tokens, affecting and breaking several established contracts.
According to ETCnodes, currently the Ethereum Classic network has a total of 624 nodes, of which 304 nodes are managed by the OpenEthereum software. On the other hand, multi geth, another Ethereum Classic client that also withdrew its support for the project, operates another 126 nodes. In total, the withdrawal of both companies would add up to a total of 430 nodes on the ETC network that are left without software support, leaving it with only 194 active nodes using other clients. This is a delicate situation that generates serious problems for the Ethereum Classic project.
On the other hand, OpenEthereum admitted that it will continue developing its client for the Ethereum (ETH) network.
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“Balance between immutability and the need for innovation”
Ethereum Classic originated in 2016 thanks to a hard fork of Ethereum. In that year, Ethereum suffered an attack on one of its most important smart contracts and communities, the famous The dao. The vulnerability in The DAO allowed the hacking of a good part of the community funds at that time, about 55 million dollars. From that moment on, the developers and the community took different paths and divided the network in two through a hard forkThis event gave rise to what we now know as Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, the first being the network that returned funds to affected users, and the second the one that kept the original blockchain unchanged.
Although Ethereum Classic can be considered the original blockchain, the network has not enjoyed the same level of development as Ethereum. In fact, the withdrawal of two of its most important clients leaves the ETC network with a high level of centralization, with 190 nodes in the hands of the client. CoreGeth, which is supported by ETC Labs.
In this regard, the CEO of ETC Labs, Terry Culver, announced that:
“ETC network developers should be more open to innovation and should balance immutability with the need for innovation (which was introduced with the Phoenix upgrade).”
The need to balance these two elements is essential for the development and sustainability of a network. With the withdrawal of both clients, the ETC network would be available to only 2 clients, CoreGeth, which we already mentioned, with current control over 190 nodes, and Besu which has only 4 nodes. At this point it is clear that the centralization of network development may become a problem later on.
Furthermore, if we add a new software update that is incompatible with previous versions, it is possible that the network will suffer a new fork and split again, since CoreGeth and Besu nodes would use a different version from the rest. Also, since CoreGeth and Besu are viable options, we will surely see several nodes of the ETC network migrating to these clients.
Continue reading: Ethereum 2.0 will launch its latest testnet in early August
