The latest progress of the ETC community: everything is ready, only the application is missing

After the Ethereum blockchain was split into two independent blockchains, ETC (the original Ethereum chain) did not receive support from the Ethereum Foundation, but it attracted some supporters who firmly believed in the decentralized, censorship-resistant, and immutable nature of blockchain. Currently, Chinese ETC supporters have become an important driving force for the global ETC community.

Looking back at the birth of ETC:

• On April 30, 2016, The DAO, an Ethereum-based project application, went online and started a 28-day global crowdfunding;
• On May 28, 2016, the crowdfunding ended, raising more than 11.5 million ethers, equivalent to more than 150 million US dollars, becoming the largest crowdfunding project in global history. On the same day, The DAO began to be traded on major digital currency exchanges;
• On June 17, 2016, hackers launched an attack on multiple vulnerabilities in The DAO smart contract and transferred 36 million ether to an anonymous address, almost one-third of the total 1,150 ether raised by The DAO crowdfunding;
• On June 30, 2016, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin proposed the idea of ​​a hard fork;
• On July 15, 2016, the specific hard fork plan was announced and the coin withdrawal contract was established;
• On July 21, 2016, more than 85% of the computing power supported the hard fork, and Ethereum underwent a hard fork, resulting in two independent blockchains: ETH (Ethereum fork) and ETC (Ethereum original chain).

On September 3, at the ETC Global Meetup Shanghai Station, the ETCC Blockchain Alliance was officially established, aiming to promote the practice of the core values ​​of blockchain: decentralization, censorship resistance, and immutability.

On September 19, the ETC Sustainable Development Foundation Preparatory Group initiated in China held a closed meeting in Shanghai. Zou Laihui (ROY), Han Feng, Guo Hongcai, Li Dawei, Zhao Qianjie and other influential members of the Preparatory Committee in the digital currency community jointly signed the "ETCC Original Chain Ethereum Promotion Association Charter" and issued the "ETC Difficulty Curse Guarantee Plan Consensus".

Why support ETC?

ETC's supporters come from many aspects. The initial support comes from idealists who are loyal to the original characteristics of blockchain. They believe that the irreversibility of blockchain is the original intention of the designer, and decentralization and distributed nodes are the core spirit of blockchain.

Another reason why some ecosystem application developers support ETC is that, compared with ETH, an ecosystem that is overly influenced by the Ethereum Foundation, ETC follows the basic principles of a decentralized open source community and has a higher degree of freedom in application development. Of course, speculators are also following it. There is always a large price difference between ETC and ETH after the fork, and the huge room for growth is full of profit temptations for speculators.

Within a week when the ETC Sustainable Development Promotion Association was discussing the ETC follow-up support plan, the ETH network was attacked twice. Previously, ETH planned to modify the algorithm in March 2017, switching from the POW (proof of work) mechanism to the POS (proof of equity) mechanism, and the differences between POW and POS in the community intensified. Dr. Xu Gang, CEO of BitSky, believes:

“After ETH switches to POS, it is even foreseeable that ETH will fork into two chains again because of the existence of a large number of original miners. Once ETH becomes two chains, the value of ETC will be highlighted again. Another point that needs to be emphasized is that Chinese people have no say in Bitcoin and Ethereum, but in the ETC community, China still has the opportunity to dominate both development and application.”

ETC and ETH are not a zero-sum game

ETC and ETH are not a zero-sum game. After intensive discussions in the past week, the ETC community has reached a consensus: ETC and ETH are parallel rather than opposing.

Roy, a member of the ETC community core team and secretary-general of the ETCC original chain Ethereum Promotion Association Secretariat, believes that

"The growth and development of the ETC community does not harm anyone, but brings benefits to the entire industry. It provides a very good experimental product. We did not deny ETH because ETC and ETH have different positioning. ETH may not be in the mass market, it has the market for enterprises and industries, and can be regarded as a consortium chain; while ETC is positioned as a public chain that adheres to the characteristics of the blockchain itself. I think both can develop. The scale of the entire industry is still very small. We should not compete internally, but think about how to promote this technology to other industries."

Community progress: everything is ready, only the application is missing

At present, whether from the perspective of application development, resource support, or community foundation, the entire ETC ecosystem is still very weak. While the moral perspective prevails, does ETC really have development potential?

Yuan Xun is one of the developers in the ETC community. He told reporters that he plans to rewrite the programming language to lower the threshold for use, so that more interested developers can easily and conveniently develop smart contracts. Yuan Xun works at YUANENGR in Chicago, USA, and has a background in computer science compilation theory. He said,

“Ethereum’s own development tools, such as the solidity language, have many functional vulnerabilities, including security vulnerabilities; Mist is difficult to install and set up. The development of ETC provides a good opportunity to create a new compiler platform and application execution environment.”

At the BTC and ETC exchange meeting hosted by BTCC on September 24, Elaine Ou, a core developer of the ETC community, also expressed her views on the Ethereum hard fork. Elaine is a PhD from Stanford University, a lecturer at the University of Sydney, and a Bitcoin enthusiast and developer. At this meeting, she discussed with many enthusiasts from the ETC and BTC communities the best technical solutions to the current development of digital currencies.

After the hard fork, China Bitcoin Exchange launched ETC transactions as soon as possible, with the daily trading volume exceeding 17 million ETC at one point. At the same time, China Bitcoin also took the lead in donating 50% of the ETC transaction fees to ETC developers, community organizations, Dapp applications and ETC activities to help the healthy development of the ETC community.

The ETCC Alliance stated that the donated funds will be used to pay for website construction expenses, developers, translators and event promoters. There are also reports that BTCC, which has the longest operating time, will launch the ETC mining pool.

At present, it seems that everything is ready for ETC's ecological construction, except for application.

Shanghai-based 91pool founders Chen Gang and Mei Wenxiang operate the world's second-largest ETC mining pool, which has more than 10% of the computing power of the entire ETC network and has mining farms in Sichuan and Shanghai.

They are currently preparing an ICO project related to ETC - ETCWIN Exchange. This may become the first practical application on ETC (Ethereum original chain) after the hard fork. Chen Gang believes:

"At present, it is necessary to build ETC's value ecosystem from the bottom up, expand ETC's usage scenarios, motivate the enthusiasm of ETC community developers, and promote the birth of practical applications of blockchain smart contracts." They are full of confidence in the future development of ETC, and now he said, "We want to be the first."

In terms of application, Dr. Xu Gang believes that ETC has inherent advantages in asset trading.

“The problem with ETH is that it is too ambitious and wants to do everything, but it does not have such wonderful technology. ETC can focus on this direction, because asset trading is particularly afraid of hard forks, and forks are inevitable on ETH.”

Angel investor and Bitcoin and Ethereum miner Guo Hongcai has previously publicly stated that he will launch a 51% attack on ETC. Now, he is ETC's most staunch supporter. Recently, he has been promoting ETC at community exchange events across the country. Yesterday, he tweeted that he would invest in 100 ETC applications in the next three years and publicly called for business plans.

Although the situation of ETC (Ethereum original chain) after the fork is a bit embarrassing, all parties in the community are gearing up and eager to try. The future trend is unpredictable, but the current development status may be a good start for ETC.