Ethereum Classic has effectively completed a system-wide upgrade of its software in an effort to enhance its interoperability with Ethereum, the blockchain platform from which it split from back in 2016.
The upgrade referred to as ‘Atlantis’ hard fork means that all the platform users will have to upgrade their customers so as to remain within the rules and guidelines of the network. According to a press release by the Ethereum Classic Labs, the startup behind the Ethereum Classic, there were 10 Ethereum improvement Proposals (EIPs) which were all taken care of by the Atlantis hard fork to enhance stability, performance, update opcodes, precompiled contracts, zk-SNARKs as well as enhance security, CoinDesk reports.
Afri Schoedon, the coordinator of hard fork congratulated everyone who was involved in the upgrade while the director in charge of developer relations, Yaz Khoury explained that the fork brought about long-lasting debates before consensus was reached saying that it was all worth for a strong network.
The Atlantis hard fork was slated to be executed before the end of summer but disagreements especially on EIP 170 led to postponement.
The hard fork was coordinated by ETC Labs in conjunction with community members such as Chainsafe System as well as ETC Cooperative. This means that there was no single actor that coordinated the hard fork.
CoinDesk reports that At the start of this week, about 60 percent of the nodes as well as approximately 75% of the hashing power had authenticated the upgrade. Various renowned crypto exchanges such as Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, Poloniex, Shapeshift as well as OKEx have indicated to ETC Labs they have updated their platforms in support of Atlantis.
According to ETC Lab’s head Terry Culver, the aim of Atlantis is to work closely with Ethereum saying that most of the EIPs added to Atlantis have been running on Ethereum for a while and this will make it easy for a crossover between the two platforms, moreso for dapps. Culver added that the hard fork was necessary to ensure the two platforms support each other.
Ethereum Classic originated in 2016 as an Ethereum hard fork after the DAO saga which was a hacked funding scheme which led to confusion in the crypto industry.
