It’s a pleasure to formally announce ETC Labs Core. ETC Labs Core is the new core development team at ETC Labs. The team will be focused on core Ethereum Classic projects, supporting the ETC blockchain, providing tooling for decentralized application development, mining, and services. In pursuit of our mission, we value state immutability, decentralization, and backward compatibility.

The core development team consists of skilled and passionate developers, but not limited to, Constantine Kryvomaz, Michael Collison, Mike Lubinets, Shane Jonas, Stevan Lohja, and Zachary Belford.

We are excited to announce our project plan to the community!

Our Project Plan

Protocol

ETH Compatibility ECIP-1045 (Byz + Const HF) Q1 2019: Team will review ETH’s Constantinople fork prior to finalizing ECIP-1045 which will propose a subset of Byzantine and Constantinople upgrades. In coordination with IOHK, ETC Coop, other ETC teams, and the community, we hope to propose a firm block number for implementing the changes.

Classic Geth Q1-Q2 2019: Support and maintenance for Classic Geth.

Multi-Geth Q1-Q4 2019: Continuous support and maintenance for Multi-Geth.

EVM

ETH Compatibility Q1 2019: The EVM and SputnikVM will be updated to support the Byz + Const hard fork.

Embedded SVM Q1 2019: Embedded SVM will allow EVM and SputnikVM for embedded applications.

ETC JIT Compiler Q1 — Q3 2019: The ETC JIT compiler will translate EVM byte-code to native machine code. The JIT compiler typically reduces program execution time by a factor of 3–4x.

EVM LLVM Backend Q2 — Q4 2019: With an EVM backend target for LLVM, developers can use a large scope of programming languages other than Solidity to target the Ethereum Virtual Machine. An EVM backend target opens opportunities for source level debugging and exposes EVM interest to the LLVM community.

Data Analytics

Chain Monitoring & Analysis Tooling ASAP 2019: In light of the recent 51% attack on Ethereum Classic, sufficient chain monitoring and chain analysis tooling are an immediate priority and we want to get this tooling available as soon as possible.

Tooling

Emerald SDK, IPFS and Multi-geth support: Drum roll please… to be announced.

JSON RPC Schema ~Q1 — Q2 2019: Create ECIP for automated JSON Schema generation from Classic-Geth and Multi-Geth. This will reduce operational costs related to libraries. This improvement would make the DApp development environment more efficient by removing the need for RPC APIs such as Web3 or Emerald JS.

Service Runner ~Q1 — Q2 2019: A Service Runner API would help make DApp framework dependencies and integrations easier manage.

DApp Deployment Tool Q2 2019: An easy to use GUI application for developers to deploy their DApps.

Multi-network Explorer Q2 — Q3 2019: An easy to use block explorer for DApp development which can be used with any Ethereum based network.

Smart Contract IDE Q3 — Q4: An easy to use smart contract IDE and runtime environment.

Education

Documentation ~Q1 2019: A new documentation website will be provided to the community to help new and existing developers. We’re also exploring embedded documentation in our tooling.

Dev Tutorials and Guides Q1 — Q4: We will continuously support new and existing developers with tutorials and guides.

Design

UX/ UI Research: We want to know more about the DApp development environment. Therefore, we’ll be conducting research prior to our DApp tooling to come.

DApp Prototyping: Prototypes of our coming DApp tools.