On January 12, 2020, Ethereum Classic’ “Agharta” upgrade successfully completed at block number 9,573,000, according to etcnodes.org.

Agharta is a planned Ethereum Classic protocol upgrade that was designed to implement Ethereum’s Constantinople upgrades to the Ethereum Classic network and has been adopted as an accepted Ethereum Classic Improvement specification which can be found at ECIP-1056.

The just-concluded upgrade will effectively add Ethereum hard fork Constantinople’s opcodes to the ETC mainnet. Moreover, the CREATE2 opcode will permit the use of state channels implementation.

Bob Summerwill, Executive Director of ETC Cooperative, said:

“The fork apparently went very smoothly with a very high rate of node upgrades for Parity-Ethereum and Multi-Geth. Most of the Classic Geth nodes were not upgraded, and those nodes which were not upgraded are now out of consensus.’’

Ethereum Classic (ETC) is a distributed ledger and decentralized computing platform with smart contract capabilities, created in 2016 by forking the original Ethereum (ETH) project.

ETC was created after a contentious hard fork, following the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) hack in June 2016, which lead to approximately US$50 million being drained from the DAO through recursive call attacks.

Ethereum Classic Rallied More Ahead of Agharta Upgrade than Ahead of Atlantis

Ethereum Classic, now the 20th largest digital asset with the current market value of $650 million, has gained over 20% in the last 7 days and has become one of the fastest-growing coins on a month-to-month basis (+45%). This is four times more than in the month leading to its previous upgrade, Atlantis, on September 12, 2019.

In comparison, bitcoin (BTC) went up 7 per cent in the past month, while in September 2019 – the same period when ETC neared its Atlantis upgrade – it fell 11 per cent.

In the period preceding the Atlantis upgrade, ETC was moving in the same direction with BTC; both were trading sideways before crashing at the end of September 2019.

ASIC Miners to Migrate to the ETC Chain

In the coming months, ETC is expected to gain momentum as Ethereum transitions to a new consensus algorithm, ProgPoW. This is because ASIC miners may migrate en masse to the ETC chain, as they will not be able to mine on the ETH chain profitably.

So far, Huobi, Bitfinex, Bibox, HitBTC, Bittrex and Coinbase are amongst the main crypto exchanges that have already given the green light to the Agharta upgrade.

