The ETC Cooperative 2023 Retrospective Report
Donald McIntyre
March 29, 2024
We are happy to release the ETC Cooperative’s Retrospective for 2023.
The year 2023 saw the continued development and updates of the ETC Core Geth software client, the deactivation of MESS as part of the Spiral hard fork (which occurred in 2024), important infrastructure actions such as the migration to the Rivet endpoints and the upgrade of the Catacomb multisignature wallet, the first conference of the POW Summit, the successful launch of the ETC Grants DAO Program, and the continued work in marketing and communications, which included the launching of the new ETC Cooperative website.
Following are highlights of the 2023 Retrospective report.
Continuing Development of Core-Geth
One of the most important projects by the ETC Cooperative is the maintenance of the Ethereum Classic flagship software client, Core Geth. Core Geth is used by more than 99% of the network’s nodes. In 2023, the core developer team supported by the Coop released 8 updates of Core Geth, including 3 critical security patches.
Diego López León redirected his time from Besu to Core-Geth and the core dev team also supported the Blockscout instance of ETC.
The team decommissioned the Kotti testnet, and has maintained the packages of the DappNode hardware node product, which include the ETC mainnet and the Mordor testnet.
Deactivating MESS
Another important work in the year was the analysis and planning for the Spiral hard fork which included the deactivation of the Modified Exponential Subjective Scoring (MESS) feature that protected the network. The hard fork was scheduled for early 2024.
The technical details that explain the upgrade and the MESS deactivation may be found here and here.
Rivet Endpoints
In the first half of 2023, the ETC Cooperative migrated the ETC endpoints service from Ethercluster to a third party infrastructure provider called Rivet.
The announcement was made in January of 2023 to give time to the ecosystem to change.
The legacy Ethercluster endpoint URLs were announced to be discontinued by July 1st of 2023, but there was a tolerance period given to those who still hadn’t made the change.
All in all, the move was smooth and there were very few reported lack of connection cases.
Catacomb Wallet
In June of 2023, the “Ethereum Classic Safe Multisignature Wallet” was upgraded and redesigned and renamed to “Catacomb Wallet”.
To promote the changes our editorial team produced a post and video to explain the new name change and the upgrades.
POW Summit
In September of 2023, the ETC Cooperative joined forces with the Litecoin Foundation to produce the POW Summit which was a big success.
Our speakers and guests discussed Proof of Work and pushed back against the misleading mainstream narratives around PoW and focused on the fundamentals of this revolutionary freedom technology.
Grants Program
After a donation of $10,000,000 by BITMAIN and a contribution of $250,000 by the ETC Cooperative to the Ethereum Classic Grant DAO Program, the first round of winners was selected and announced in 2023.
After receiving many proposals and much analysis by the program’s committee, which included proposal evaluations, technical reviews, and due diligence, the grantees were selected and received nearly $700K USD in grants payable in ETC ranging from $3,800 for community initiatives, to more than $50,000 for premium grants.
Through the rest of the year, the ETC Cooperative’ communications team followed and reported on the progress of the projects.
New Website and Other Marketing
The communications team accomplished the goal of revamping the ETC Cooperative’s website, which was redesigned to make it more modern looking, with beautiful and relevant imagery, as well as giving it an easy to navigate format for users to find from the cooperative’s official documents to all the blog posts and videos.
The communications team reports below the performance and work done with regard to marketing, editorial, and social media promotions.
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