Ethereum Classic is on its way to get a hard fork in the next two days.
Ethereum recently split into two blockchains following a hard fork introduced by the Ethereum development team a few months ago. The hard fork resulted in two versions — Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC). While Ethereum continued to operate on the new fork, a portion of the cryptocurrency community decided to continue with the original Ethereum blockchain, calling it Ethereum Classic.
Ethereum recently came under a sustained DoS attack. The continuous attack, going on for weeks was executed by someone who was skilled enough to identify lots of shortcomings in the smart contracts protocol’s codes. Ethereum released multiple patches and finally decided to implement two hard forks consecutively to solve the issue once and for all.
READ MORE: Under Sustained Attack, Ethereum to Introduce Hard Forks
Given that Ethereum Classic also shares a lot of similarities with Ethereum, ETC blockchain was not spared either. Ethereum Classic has finally decided to take the same approach as Ethereum to save itself from the attackers. The platform has announced the upcoming hard fork which will be implemented on Monday 25, October 2016. ETC has already released two new versions within a span of two weeks. The first one, Ethereum Classic 2.0.0 was released about 11 days ago. In this release, ETC developers have removed support for ETH/61 and introduced ECIP-1010 also known as the “delay difficulty bomb”. It also fixed the “Shanghai with Love” attack issue, which affected the Ethereum blockchain.
Last week, ETC announced yet another version – Ethereum Classic 3.0.0. The beta version set to be implemented on 25th will be changing the gas pricing for various EVM operations. Since the announcement, developers have made improvements to the protocol to include EF Mist compatibility. In order to ensure uninterrupted operations, ETC advises the community to upgrade to Ethereum Classic 3.0.1 before the hard fork.
ETC was the creation of a portion of Ethereum community who were against the introduction of hard forks without proper consensus. However, the tables seem to have turned now. The attacks have made sure that ETC does what it hated the most a few months ago, introducing a hard fork.
Ref: GitHub | Image: Ethereum Classic