I'd like to thank everyone from the Ethereum Classic community for their support. I'm really excited to present the following statement which is in reference to monetary policy for the ETC platform. The Ethereum Classic community has grown substantially since its inception in July of 2016. In order to further Ethereum Classic’s vision, the community needs to adopt a monetary policy that balances the long-term interests of investors, developers, and business operators.

This statement represents a collaborative show of support for the monetary policy proposed in ECIP 1017. As industry stakeholders, ETC community members, exchange operators, mining pool operators, miners, wallet providers, developers, the Distributed Autonomous Coalition Asia (DACA) and the China Ethereum Classic Consortium (ECC), and other industry participants; we are committed to jointly planning and implementing a road map to effect the future ETC monetary policy.

We have agreed on the following points:

We understand that a monetary policy has been proposed that establishes an upper bound on the total number of ETC that will ever be issued, and that this policy was the result of extensive discussions within the community. The policy also defines a method of reducing the block reward over time. It is available in English here and in Chinese here.

The new monetary policy sets a limit for the total ETC issuance. The block reward will be reduced by 20% at block number 5,000,000, and another 20% every 5,000,000 blocks thereafter. Uncle block rewards will also be reduced. Due to variations in the reward rate of ETC, we anticipate the total supply to be approximately 210 million ETC, not to exceed 230 million ETC.

We will continue to work with the Ethereum Classic protocol development community to develop, in public, a safe hard fork procedure based on the proposed monetary policy. ETCDEV Team will provide an implementation of the monetary policy for both the geth and parity clients after the hard fork procedure is agreed upon.

We will run consensus systems that are compatible with Ethereum Classic clients, which will eventually contain the ECIP 1017 monetary policy and the hard-fork, in production.

Based on the above points, the timeline will likely follow the below dates.

Geth and Parity clients that include the updated monetary policy are expected to be released in June 2017.

If there is strong network-level support, the hard-fork activation will likely happen around Fall 2017.

If the hard fork is activated, the first reduction in block reward will happen around December 2017.

Our common goal is to make Ethereum Classic a success. We believe that the community can unite and work together to achieve a sustainable global platform.

Together, we are: