Today, San Francisco based Ethereum Classic Labs announced a partnership with Metronome to enable, for the first time, cross-blockchain “chain hop” interoperability. This allows digital assets to be transferred between two of the largest blockchains – Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC) and back.

The ETC Labs’ advancements to Ethereum Classic (such as the Atlantis hard fork, among other projects), deliver greater compatibility for blockchain solutions, enabling Metronome cross-chain transactions to quickly, easily, and securely occur between ETH and ETC.

“ETC Labs has worked hard to improve Ethereum Classic to provide greater cross-chain interoperability,” said Jeff Garzik, CEO and co-founder of Bloq, chief designer of Metronome, and one of the earliest Bitcoin developers. “ETC Labs’ improvements to Ethereum Classic helps Metronome to provide self-governance, reliability and portability to the global community to store-of-value, payment and transactions across Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.”

As part of the relationship, ETC Labs will support Metronome’s Validator Network to ensure reliable and secure transaction verification that guards against double-spend attacks and provides fluid cross-chain transactions. Metronome’s Validator Network will initially consist of 5+ decentralized, off-chain validators to attest to the validity of transactions and grow its decentralized community.

“We are excited to work with the Metronome team to help initiate its Validator Network, which will first enable movement of Metronome tokens between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic,” said Terry Culver, ETC Labs’ CEO. “The work ETC Labs and the community have done with Ethereum Classic’s open-source protocol has extended that protocol’s value such that projects like Metronome can be confident in Ethereum Classic’s role in the global decentralized community. This will further the adoption of mainstream applications.”

The Atlantis upgrade consists of 10 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) that focus on stability, Op-code upgrades, precompiled contracts to improve zk-Snarks, performance related improvements and enhanced security (EIP 658). It also provides features and functionality that will bring it to a similar level as the Ethereum blockchain, reducing development cycles and improving interoperability between blockchains.