The hard fork occurred at the height of block 9,573,000 during the early hours of Sunday, January 12th. After the fork, the hash rate remained stable at 12 EH/s.
As announced, Ethereum Classic’s hard fork Agharta was completed during the early hours of January 12th at the height of block 9,573,000. The programmers reported, through the twitter account @eth_classic, that the process was conducted without complications or delays in the mainnet.
With Agharta, Ethereum Classic adds Ethereum’s Constantinople bit-by-bit information processing code to the ETC mainnet, which will generate greater compatibility between both. Besides, the programmers would improve the capabilities of the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM). Another element is the addition of the create2 operation code that will be in a position to boost scalability for transactions outside the Ethereum Classic network. It was also considered to add the EXTCODEHASH opcode, which serves to optimize executions on a larger scale in smart contracts.
The ECIP 1056 improvement proposal, created on March 25th, 2019 by Isaac Ardis and Wei Tang, summarizes the objectives as follows: “to enable excellent updates of the Constantinople and Petersburg protocols from the Ethereum network to the Ethereum Classic network on a hard fork called Agharta to allow for maximum compatibility between these networks.” In other words, ETC added Ethereum improvement proposals EIP 145, EIP 1014 and EIP 1052.
The processing power of the network was not affected by the hard fork. According to data from Coinwarz, the hash rate of the blockchain remained around 12.2 exa hashes per second (EH/s) before the hard fork was applied, and then between 12.1 and 12.2 during Sunday afternoon. Regarding difficulty, it remained at 153.51 T.
Second Fork in 4 Months
Agharta has been the second Ethereum Classic’s hard fork within four months. In September 2019, the developers applied the Atlantis hard fork to the mainnet, which generated a decrease close to 50% in processing power. On that occasion, the application was also conducted smoothly, but with the passing of the hours, the hash rate fell significantly, which has not been registered after applying the current changes at the time of writing this article.
It should be remembered that Ethereum Classic’s hard fork is not contentious, that is, all the groups making life in this particular cryptosystem agreed with the changes, which did not generate a new network or a new cryptocurrency.
Regarding the process of updating the nodes, the website etcnodes.org indicated that, so far, 57% of the operators have updated their clients. For this network, the most popular clients are Parity Ethereum, Geth and Multigeth.
The Ethereum Classic project represented in 2016 Ethereum’s first hard fork after the theft, following an attack, of the Ethereum DAO that led to the loss of 3.6 million ethers (ETH), Ethereum’s native cryptocurrency. The solution considered at that time was that of applying a hard fork, from which ETC was born, to recover the stolen funds.
At the time of writing this article, the price of ETC is USD 5.41, with a negative variation of 6% in the last 24 hours.
By Willmen Blanco
