Former Bitcoin Core lead maintainer Gavin Andresen announced today the first release of Bitcoin Classic on GitHub, numbered 0.11.2, the latest bitcoin scalability project that he is backing. The focus of Bitcoin Classic is doubling the transaction capacity of the Bitcoin network. It includes a consensus rule change that increases the block size limit from one megabyte to two megabytes. The release is based on Core version 0.11.2, and is compatible with its blockchain files and wallet.

Andresen stated:

Our next release will be based on Bitcoin Core version 0.12, and is expected to be ready in the next weeks. In parallel, we will focus development on features that have been requested by miners and companies for a long time now, and that will help Bitcoin scale on-chain: Faster block validation

Faster block propagation

Andresen and the other proponents of the fork believe its features will help alleviate bandwidth issues and will ensure that network nodes & miners can continue to operate properly, without requiring much faster connections. More importantly, they believe it will enable Bitcoin to scale to much higher transaction volumes.

Unlike the failure of his previously backed hard fork, Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic’s plan to hard fork Bitcoin to a 2MB blocksize limit apparently has consensus among miners in the Bitcoin network.

In addition to Andresen, the other developers involved in Bitcoin Classic include Jeff Garzik – another Bitcoin Core developer, Pedro Pinheiro – a Blockchain.info backend engineer, Tom Zander, and Jon Rumion.