Survival! Achieving compatibility with Ethereum, ETC completes the "Agharta" hard fork upgrade

According to the blockchain explorer Etcnodes, Ethereum Classic successfully completed the "Agharta" hard fork on the 12th of this month at 06:26 UTC (14:26 Taiwan time) at block height 9573000.

Similar to the Atlantis upgrade in September last year, which was backwards-incompatible, Agharta aims to make Ethereum Classic more compatible with Ethereum.

According to a report, Ethereum Classic has notified node operators to update their nodes before January 12 and reiterated that this update is not a contentious fork within the community but a "routine protocol upgrade."

As of now, over 57% of the nodes have been updated, while 42% of the nodes have yet to follow suit.

Seeking Coexistence After the Split

In 2016, Ethereum faced the DAO hack, leading to a split in the community. Ethereum decided to roll back the chain to prevent fund theft, while some members believed this violated the immutability of the blockchain and chose to stay on the original chain, resulting in the birth of Ethereum Classic (ETC).

Three years after the split, Ethereum Classic has been working to rebuild compatibility between the two communities and technologies. The previous Atlantis hard fork and the current Agharta upgrade are two measures taken to achieve this.

Terry Culver, CEO of ETC core development company ETC Labs, explained that the compatibility between these two networks is expected to accelerate the development of the Ethereum Classic community and ecosystem.

Continuously Expanding Client Base

Currently, Ethereum Classic has 4 major node operators, including 167 users from Parity Ethereum, 77 from Multi-Geth, 17 from Geth Classic, and 2 from Besu, totaling 263 nodes that have been updated.

Bob Summerwill, Co-Executive Director of Ethereum Classic, commented on the upgrade:

Geth Classic has essentially been deprecated and will no longer be supported. It seems that most node operators are adopting the upgrade recommendation and starting the migration.

Afri Schoedon, Ethereum Classic fork coordinator at Parity Ethereum, also stated:

Geth Classic has seen almost no updates since 2016 and has been deprecated. With every fork upgrade, some less important nodes are always lost, those nodes do not perform well in maintenance, so we are not worried about this.

With positive news released, Ethereum Classic has seen a 12.5% increase in the past week, reaching a price of 5.47 USD at the time of writing, ranking 20th by market capitalization and hitting a new high since September 25 last year.

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