Ethereum Classic mainnet successfully upgraded to the Agharta protocol over the weekend at block 9,573,000. The main aim behind this upgrade was to make Ethereum Classic more interoperable with Ethereum, to promote more compatibility between ETC and ETH. To do this Agharta has incorporated opcodes that were introduced Ethereum Foundation (ETH) network via Constantinople and Petersburg hard-forks:

EIP 145 – Bitwise shifting operations

EIP 1014 – Skinny CREATE2

EIP 1052 – EXTHASHCODE opcode

Why is this important for Ethereum Classic?

The simple answer is that it makes life easier for parties operating on both blockchains. For example, Hyperledger Besu, Parity, and Multi Geth have all released clients that are compatible with Agharta, which is why the upgrade has been carried out so smoothly - as node operators have not run into difficulties to update their clients. Furthermore, improved compatibility between the two chains should attract more developers that wish to access a larger market (ETH+ETC) which in turn will accelerate the development of Ethereum Classic's ecosystem.

Agharta Ready Nodes (Source: etcnodes.org)

While it is true that we are currently seeing 41% of nodes have not been upgraded, the belief is that these clients are running Geth Classic which is not compatible with the hard-fork. Node operators who were running Classic Geth nodes were recommended to spin up new nodes using a supported client - hopefully, this was done.

Positive Signs for ETC

Not only did the market react very positively to the upgrade, with ETC seeing a price gain of over 74% at one point during the past month - yes, we can always attribute a little of price gains during protocol upgrades to hype and FOMO. However, there has been much recent development activity that makes 2020 look very exciting for ETC.

Hyperledger Besu - ETC support was added to Besu in December 2019 (funded by ETC Cooperative and implemented by ChainSafe).

Etcnodes.org - Fantastic analytical dashboard and tracking tool for ETC nodes which has made it much easier to follow hard-forks.

Expedition.dev - New block explorer, which from my experience, is the first tool to show accurate Gas Price estimations.

Vyper integration - Developers can now write smart contracts in Vyper and are no longer restricted to Solidity.

Future is bright!

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