I am pleased to share that at Devcon 5, ETC Labs announced several new partnerships to expand the growing collaboration between Ethereum Classic and Ethereum, and to strengthen both communities.

ETCLabs is committed to greater collaboration between the Ethereum Classic and Ethereum communities. ETH and ETC share history, DNA, values, and increasingly, technical functionality. While ETC will remain as a Proof of Work (PoW) chain, there are ample opportunities to work together.

GITCOIN is integrating Ethereum Classic. In 2020, we will launch a regular series of bounties and hackathons that will be available to both the Ethereum and Ethereum Classic communities. This is the first cross-chain collaboration for Gitcoin. So I would like to give a warm welcome to Gitcoin to Ethereum Classic. This is ETC’s first platform integration for developers to crowdfund, and it advances technical projects with a trusted partner in the right way with the developer community. All of us in the ETC Community very much look forward to working with the GitCoin team.

SWARM. ETC Labs will partner with SWARM, because we believe in their potential. SWARM addresses key questions in blockchain and we are aligned with the vision for cross-chain collaboration. We are confident in SWARM, and excited about the current roadmap. We will provide support and developer resources from our ETC team.

BLOQCLOUD. ETC Labs has partnered with Bloq to launch BloqCloud Connect for Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. BloqCloud is a managed infrastructure service that will be available to both networks. The service will provide developers throughout the Ethereum Stack with a single API and end-points for DApps and wallets. It will be free for the first two years to developers, with enterprise service-level contracts also available.

ETC needs this kind of infrastructure in order to grow. We also thought that if we’re building it anyway and we are committed to participating in the Ethereum community, so let’s contribute this resource as a gesture of goodwill.

The partnership with Bloq is an expression of our commitment to driving innovation and contributing to the overall growth of the Ethereum Classic and Ethereum Communities. We are doing this to make our networks stronger and to ensure that developers have the infrastructure they need to deliver on the promise of blockchain.

In addition, we are committed to building high quality technology, especially if it helps address fundamental, long-term challenges. This includes forward-looking, innovative research and development. We are supporting the development of a stateless client prototype with Alexey Akhunov.

We are also looking at innovative ways that ETC can play an active role in addressing scalability issues on ETH. An immediate one is the possibility of using ETC as a short-term data availability layer, as raised by Vitalik on Ethereum Research this summer. With ETC’s 14 second block time and lower gas fees, this seems like a viable solution. However there are some challenges. We have started what is an early stage research project led by Isaac Ardis, from the ETCLabs core team to map out how this would work and how to build it.

We are working on solving this in part with FlyClient support to reduce gas costs of header verification. But FlyClient is only one part of the solution. Just using that could result in bloat. So there are larger questions about PoW verification that we need to think through more carefully.

Lastly, we are using LLVM to target the EVM infrastructure. We aim to provide front-end support for more programming languages beyond Solidity and to provide LLVM-based developer tools. We are adding support for Rust, C/C++ and we can add others. This will enable the LLVM infrastructure to support EVM, along with EWASM, making it a future proof toolchain for developers. The project is led by Alan Li from the ETC Labs core team with collaboration from Second State. We think the LLVM will make ECT and ETH more accessible to a range of developers because of its wide use and high quality. We expect to have an alpha version released in 2–3 months.

Please stay tuned as we develop these and other projects further.

Terry Culver

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