The company itself is the owner of almost 30% of the remaining nodes. There has been prior conflict between ETC developers over the defense of immutability.

OpenEthereum, a client that runs 300 Ethereum Classic (ETC) nodes, has voted to stop maintaining its software and focus on other projects. The reason for making this decision was the concern about the loss of the immutability of the ETC network, the main feature that distinguished it from Ethereum. The update Phoenix, which occurred in June of this year, may have affected the immutability.

The last hard fork of the ETC network, Phoenix, introduced changes to the internal structure of the tokens of the ETC blockchain. These changes broke some smart contracts, thus damaging the “immutability” of the ETC network, according to the OpenEthereum GitHub, a project that Gnosis developers advanced.

In this way, OpenEthereum joins Multi-Geth, a client that runs 129 ETC nodes. When they joined, they stopped updating 429 of the 622 nodes that the ETC network currently has. In other words, the network would lose support for the clients of 68.9% of its nodes.

This is not an immediate problem as there is still no network update incompatible with previous versions. However, if a strong fork occurs in the future, those nodes that have not upgraded to other Ethereum Classic clients, such as Besu or Core Geth, would keep a different version from that of the forked. That could lead the chains to separate.

ETC Labs, developer project of CoreGeth, the client that currently supports 189 of the remaining 193 nodes, has stated that “dogmatism does not help”. With this, they refer to the immutability of the network. Its CEO Terry Culver suggested that Ethereum Classic developers should be more open to innovation and balance the immutability with the need for innovation that Phoenix introduced.

Bob Summerwill, CEO of the ETC Cooperative, told the ETC community that both Core-Geth and Hyperledger Besu are viable options for end-users. For that reason, some nodes may migrate to these clients in the coming months.

This is not the first time that Ethereum Classic has had such disagreements. In the year 2016, Ethereum Classic was born after attackers exploited vulnerability on the Ethereum mainnet, which allowed them to steal the equivalent of USD 60 million. At that time, Vitalik Buterin and his team decided to perform a rollback of the main Ethereum blockchain to a previous state. In this way, they sought to recover the funds that they lost in that hack.

Some members of the community did not agree with that decision and organized themselves to keep the network the way it was. In other words, they decided to keep the immutability of the original blockchain. In this way, the hard fork that led to the creation of Ethereum Classic (ETC) occurred in parallel with that of Ethereum (ETH).

By Alexander Salazar

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