An Open letter to Ethereum Classic community

I am Roy, a long time Ethereum Classic supporter since July 2016. Chairman of ETCC — Ethereum Classic Consortium (China), which was founded to promote the decentralized and immutable ETC in China in September 2016. The founding members are over 10 Blockchain companies and individual including BTCC, CHBTC, DACA (an association of Chinese Bitcoin community), Chandler Guo etc. I organized Chinese ETC community since July 2016. It is a huge community almost cover the whole crypto community in China. We have done a lot of great events in China including the first meetup we held in Shanghai in September 2016. Avtar Sehra, one of the key member of the community, also participated in this event. We all have strong faith in ETC because ETC is a decentralized and immutable Blockchain. We see ETC has a bright future in the digital society, to empower our dreams to rebuild the infrastructure of this broken society.

Since Chinese ETC community initiated in July 2016, we are doing very well for over the past 2 years. I still remember how I was excited when I contacted the main figures in Chinese crypto community and told them we were going to build an ETC community in China. Everyone was so supportive and gave us their ideas about how we can build a robust ETC community in China. My gratitude to some figures like ChangJia (长铗), founder of 8btc (a Blockchain medium found in 2011), who is the first person who supported me to build a forum for ETC in China in July 2016. Samson Mow, former COO of BTCC (the very early founded crypto exchange since 2011), even hosted a meetup with ETCC in October 2016 to discuss the future of ETC. One of the speakers is Elaine Ou, who is one of the key members of the community. Other jobs like I did the translation of The Ethereum Classic Declaration of Independence into Chinese, along with Matt, we worked hard to see all the community to support Ethereum Classic’s Monetary Policy. I would say I feel honorable and lucky to work with so many talented guys who truly believe the potential of Blockchain. We have a strong community, along with exchanges, mining pools, wallet providers, enthusiasts etc. I love ETC so much. I am proud of doing volunteer jobs for this community since the inception of ETC community. My company BITKIO also operates an independent team to manage the Chinese community, translate the ETC news and upgrade of technology into Chinese. We’ve built a strong community along with members of ETCC. I spent most of my time working on it. I went to some exchanges like one of the biggest crypto exchanges Huobi and Okcoin, giving talks in their company why ETC is so important and how strong our community is. Finally, after our efforts, they listed ETC to be their only one of four cryptocurrencies to in their platforms.

Unfortunately, one thing happened that has a bad impact on the Chinese community. In March 2018. DFG (former name Huiyin Blockchain Venture)’s James Wo and Christian Xu came to us and asked for handing over all the controlling of community resources including the community media channels we built and domain name. I felt it was not a good sign so after talking with some members of the community, we said no. One month later, they announced an “official” ETC community in China, posted the news everywhere with Igor (lead of ETCDEV Team)’s congratulation letter. They contacted my employees and asked them to leave to work for them with higher salaries. I had to pause some community jobs for 3 months until we hire new staff to continue the jobs. This situation causes chaos in the Chinese community. People keep going to ask me why there is a new “official” community.

In these days, I noticed that there is the same attack happened in the community. It is similar to what happened in the Chinese community half a year ago.

However, I regard it as an opportunity to rethink how we should organize the community and what governance model we should choose. I believe this community has the wisdom to solve this. ETC community is a decentralized community where we promote an immutable and censorship-resistant Blockchain project. Everyone has the right to join and contribute to it without permission with good original desire aspiration. We can’t accept any individual or entity controls the ETC by the means of the social and technical layer.

To be clear, I have no offense to anyone including the names I mentioned here. For now, ETC is still a great decentralized project and we will continue our mission.

Tomorrow will be a better world. ETC will thrive!