Lately there’s been a lot of speculation about ETC, the price is rising, the Callisto airdrop is happening, and Crypto Twitter is tweeting up a storm about ETC. Some are certainly trading for short term profits, and it’s their right to, but they’re not seeing the forest for the trees. Even worse, some have dubbed ETC a shitcoin, as if we’ve existed this long to just be another pump and dump. We haven’t, we aren’t, and we won’t be if I have anything to say about it.

This article sets out to give some insight into the advancements ETC has made and the bright roadmap it has for its future.

The future of ETC is the future of all Cryptocurrencies, and that future is interoperability, there will be no one winner. ETC will become highly interoperable while others naively fight to be dominant.

At the core of our sidechains is SputnikVM which can run smart contracts anywhere... You can do this today. Not at some nebulous time in the future.

Sidechains

We’re going to have sidechains this year, transactions on them will be free, and even very low powered devices will be able to use them. We’ll be the first blockchain to properly address the needs of IoT devices. While others claim to, and start announcing partnerships before anything even works, we’ll be the first to really get it done.

At the core of our sidechains is SputnikVM which can run smart contracts anywhere, such as in the browser or you can put it in embedded devices. You can do this today. Not at some nebulous time in the future.

Our sidechains will be highly flexible. They’ll allow whoever created them to choose between PoA or PoS approaches. They can be public, private or otherwise permissioned depending on your needs.

Ease of use

Every blockchain still needs to improve their usability but we’ve made great strides. We’ve got beautiful, well-working wallets (Emerald Wallet, CEW). A simple DNS-like system (via CEW). Mobile wallets exist and more are coming. We’re supported everywhere, we’re on every major exchange, we’re very popular internationally, we’re even making our way into Cardano’s wallet.

Sent myself some ETC and it showed up in Emerald Wallet in about 20 seconds.

Easier development

Currently developing for blockchain tech is fairly low-level, while we have languages like Solidity which very much look like JavaScript, they function like a low-level language. This leads to a lot of difficulty in development and a lot of bugs cropping up.

Emerald Project will provide a common high-level framework to ease development on Ethereum Classic. Imagine libraries where integrating with hardware wallets is as easy as ledger.connect() , or interacting with tokens is as simple as Token t = new Token(0xbeef..); t.transfer(0xfa34..) . This is just pseudocode but that’s where we are heading. No messing with RPC or hunting down ABIs necessary.

Emerald Project doesn’t end at just the code though, it also extends to the UI. Check out Emerald Wallet, look how great it looks, your apps will be able to seamlessly drop in the same elements. On the user end the consistent UI will create a familiar and cohesive feel across ETC projects.

Improved developer documentation is also coming and will be announced in the coming months.

Emerald Wallet

Installing Emerald Wallet took me literally 1 minute to install and immediately start using ETC.

I’ve also just installed Mist for Ethereum and it looks like I’ll be waiting a while. I clicked on “Launch Application” several times and nothing is happening. I seem to just be stuck on block 10,240 now.

While in Emerald Wallet I sent myself some ETC and it showed up in Emerald Wallet in about 20 seconds.

Mist on the other hand appears to have crashed. I restarted it.

Back to waiting.

In fairness it did eventually sync. And before you get mad that this is a dig at Mist developers, it’s really not, developing a good wallet is hard work, it is not easy, errors happen, and I’m sure they’ll fix these above issues.

This is simply to illustrate that ETC does have a good wallet which is able to go from install to using the ETC network in about a minute. Those who claim ETC can’t accomplish a “simple” task like a wallet are misinformed at best and willfully ignoring the issues within their own communities.

Open community

The Subreddits, Forums, Discord, and Telegrams all have separate owners. Discussion is very open and you’re not required to agree with the crowd.

We’re very anti-pump and dump, want to know why ETC’s price doesn’t rise endlessly like other coins? Because when you join our forums you may very well find that many in the community won’t promise you the moon, and we’re aware of our flaws and working hard to fix them. We think this will make ETC much more widely used in the long term, at the cost of short term lambo-moon pipe dreams.

We’re also not going to police you and tell you what to believe in or what not to. And we’re not going to put our names/faces on every project that comes along. We have principles and we will stick to them.