Image taken by yours, truly

Ah, California dreamin’. Upon landing in San Francisco, I was on the lookout for beautiful people with flowers in their hair.

Instead, what I saw in the co-working space of ETC Labs in downtown San Francisco was something much more wonderful. Over 100 people have gathered together to connect over their passion and curiosity of Ethereum Classic for the ETC Labs Launch event, which garnered over 2k total views on the live stream feed.

The launch event of the ETC Lab Pilot program has been a tremendous success. It proved that the future of Ethereum Classic is bright and filled with so much potential.

Ever since the DAO hard fork and the following shorting of 1 million Ethereum Classic coins by the Robin Hood Group (3x the amount of ETC sold by the DAO hacker), the harm they caused to the future of Ethereum Classic left a lot of things uncertain. It gave Ethereum (ETH) a stronger marketing edge as their value on the market wasn’t affected by shorting and more people went to ETH, thinking it’s the end of ETC.

However, many supporters believe in immutability as an important core value, which has given a lifeline into the ETC network and allowed it to rise as a phoenix from the ashes.

This has never been as true as what I’ve witnessed in San Francisco. Investors were networking with core developers, entrepreneurs were sharing advice with blockchain enthusiasts, all while enjoying great food and wine until the end of the night.

Amazing turnout for the ETC Labs launch event

In the middle of it all were 6 startups that have been incubated into ETC Labs and were giving a demo and pitching to potential investors.

James Wo, CEO of Digital Finance Group, first took the stage to discuss why he values immutability and decentralization, and as a result is a strong supporter of Ethereum Classic, before we went to watch the demos of the 6 awesome startups working with ETC Labs.

The Startups

Scanta is the creator of Pikamoji, the world’s first Augmented Reality (AR) emoji application, growing at 10% a week, and tested with campuses like Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. They are also tech partners with Samsung and working with Fortune 500 Companies. They want to use ETC as an IP Library to protect the copyrights of user-created Pikamoji. This is great in a world of copyrighted Cryptokitties that users don’t actually own the rights to.

Button is a very cool wallet that integrates into messenger apps. For now, it works with Telegram, but there are plans to integrate it with Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger in the future. The important thing about Button is that it doesn’t store your private keys, unlike other competitors with messenger wallets. It’s the winner of 9 hackathons including ones from IBM, Microsoft and Waves, and is a graduate from the MIT Lab Accelerator. Button plans to allow payments in ETC.

VREX Lab, founded by Rudy Lee, provides a decentralized ecosystem for VR/AR goods and content creation. They have a partnership with SK Telecom and use ETC to create the first tokenized virtual influencers.

Other startups include AnyLog which does IoT data management and uses ETC for off-chain transactions, GSC Platform which wants to disrupt supply chains with ETC smart contracts, and Quarrio which uses Natural Language Processing to generate insights from business data using the ETC network.

All those diverse groups of startups had my head swimming with all the different ways the blockchain will change our world.

The Dev Bootcamp

Developers learning to build a Solidity smart contract

On Saturday’s ETC Lab’s Dev Bootcamp, about 25 developers came to the event, which had helped garner over 5k views for the livestream feed over the weekend. Developers came to learn about how to build a smart contract with Solidity and deploy it on the ETC network. They also were excited to check out the Emerald SDK built by ETCDEV, which proves to be very interesting for the future of Ethereum Classic, especially its seamless integration with an easy to use GUI to build dApps.

Ethernode had to be the most interesting project during the bootcamp, with the founders giving a demo of how to spin off your own ETC nodes using Geth-Classic at the click of a button. They want to make running your own ETC Node and building Dapps on top of it with Emerald SDK to be a very seamless experience, and we applaud them for their efforts in building for the ETC ecosystem.

By the end of the 2 day events, one thing remains clear. Ethereum Classic is just getting started.