How does anything get done if there are no leaders? Why hasn’t ETC died by being abandoned by the Ethereum Foundation after TheDAO hard fork? The ecosystem of participants and stakeholders working in and around the ETC network is examined in outline below.

So, where and how does ETC “governance” happen?

Making changes to Ethereum Classic consensus rules is “ungoverned” in a similar way to Bitcoin and Ethereum with little appetite for large numbers of consensus-breaking upgrades. Currently it is an ad hoc process where ECIP proposals are raised on Github, discussed in public/semi-public fora and should they be widely supported without contention locked-in to the nominally canonical “Classic-Geth” client with the other clients (Parity Labs’ eponymous software and IOHK’s Mantis) merging in response. In the case of a contentious proposed upgrade some arbitrary signalling criteria could potentially be set (i.e. % of miners upgrade/signal, on-chain carbon vote as used by ETH to justify DAO hard fork) though this has not occurred in ETC since the events which led to the creation of the network.

On-chain “Carbon Vote” for TheDAO fork on Ethereum. Source: https://elaineou.com/2016/07/18/stick-a-fork-in-ethereum/

As with other networks based on the original Ethereum design, some parameters such as adjustments to the gas limit per block — restricting the amount of EVM computation in a similar way to block size / weight in Bitcoin-derived networks — can be enacted in small increments on a per block basis via miner signalling. There is currently some discussion to motivate a decrease in the gas limit per block in order to avoid the chain growth rate issues which make running ETH full nodes a challenge in terms of burdensome resouce requirements. The likely aggregation of ETC hashrate among a small number of big mining farms, cooperatives and pools presents issues with reliance on miner signalling, as recently evidenced in Bitcoin when the merge-mined EVM Rootstock sidechains went live with 80% of network hashrate signalling. The naive downstream adoption of “default” Ethereum settings such as ETH’s 8 million gas limit per block is also a potential issue for ETC’s ungovernance to navigate.

ETC Gas Limit versus Block Height. Source: http://etcsummit.pllel.com

Two hard fork network upgrades have taken place in the ETC network — ECIP-1010 to remove the “difficulty bomb” and ECIP-1017 to institute a supply cap with asymptotic supply curve.

The decision-making process could be better organised, more transparent and clearly defined and refinements to the ECIP process are currently being discussed. At present most informal community discussion takes place on ETC’s Discord server, with ECIPs themselves posted on the nominated Github account (ethereumclassic) following a power struggle and takeover of the previous canonical Github account (ethereumproject), ostensibly related to the situation with ETCLabs discussed below. ETCLabs appear to be preparing to implement their own proposed parallel “ECLIP” improvement proposal scheme though this may be a mis-communication rather than a “consensus hostage situation” — situation is unclear at time of writing. Below are a few links to recent discussions and proposals relating to how Ethereum Classic reaches decisions relating to network upgrades and changes.

Some stakeholders in ETC want to see closer collaboration with ETH, some are ambivalent and others are opposed. The recent announcement of Bob Summerwill as ETC Cooperative Executive Director is noteworthy as he was instrumental in founding the Enterprise ETH Alliance, was involved in the Ethereum Foundation, was a senior figure at Consensys. There are some existing collaborative projects between ETH and ETC, including Akomba Labs’ “Peace Bridge” to allow cross-chain transactions, Kotti unified PoA testnet and some recent discussions regarding ETC considering the adoption of aspects of the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap.

The last few months have seen a change in the composition of the ecosystem around Ethereum Classic, as a the previously pre-eminent privately funded core development team “ETCdev” collapsed due to lack of funds with another entity “ETCLabs” forming a new developer team “ETCLabs Core” with significant overlap of personnel. Some community members have described the sequence of events as a corporate takeover attempt, others do not seem so worried.

“The ETC community is still small and, in this bear market, lacks funding from volunteer investors or other sources to initiate new core maintenance and development projects or pay new core developers quickly. This is because there are no leaders, foundations, pre-mines, treasuries, protocol taxation or any other financing gimmicks that so much contaminate other centralized projects.”