Recently, Elizabeth Kukka, Program Director at ETC Labs, gave an interview Medium explaining how her Ethereum Classic (ETC) incubator (ETC Labs) is doing. Since launching on October 1, 2018, ETC Labs has, accoding to her, created quite a buzz as there’s beeen a “lof of interest and inquiries about the program,” which is set to launch in the first quarter of 2019.

ETC Labs is currently in its pilot program, testing out the incubator to see how it works. She explained the benefits of working with their incubator here:

“Pilot projects get free working space, great coffee ;), and the opportunity to work alongside some of the best minds in the business. They will also have the opportunity to pitch their ideas to a roomful of investors at our launch event on October 25th. The goal of this pilot program is to put the incubator model to work and get feedback from these initial teams before going live.”

Once these six companies pass through the pilot program, ETC Labs will be adding more projects to their team. The official launch of ETC Labs will be in the first quarter of 2019. Even though ETC Labs just launched, there’s been massive interest in the incubator. According to Elizabeth, “we have received around 120 applications so far!” That’s a big number, considering that “we plan to support around 20 to 24 startups per year.”

This is not the first blockchain incubator to be launched this year. In May, the cryptocurrency exchange Huobi announced that it would be launching a blockchain incubator. In August, Binance followed suit and announced Binance Labs.

Ethereum Classic?

Ethereum Classic is the original Ethereum blockchain. In 2016, Ethereum was victim to “The DAO” hack – a smart contract exploitation that stole millions of ETH tokens. After the hack was discovered, the Ethereum community held a vote and decided to roll back the chain and return the hacked coins. The Ethereum Classic community decided to hard fork and keep the chain as-is: stolen coins and all.

ETC has all of the features of ETH, but with a completely different developer community. ETC has not performed as well as ETH, but it has become popular enough to receive listing on Coinbase.