By In a decision made during a public call for developers on Thursday, Ethereum devs have committed to rolling out a system-wide upgrade aka a hard fork to the blockchain’s mainnet by September.
As per the decision made on the call on the 20th June, the target block number for the “Atlantis” upgrade 8,772,000, which is expected to hit at around 12:00 UTC on Sept. 17.
In light of a disagreement back in May pertaining to the contents of the upcoming upgrade, devs finally came to an agreement on Thursday about the 10 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) set for inclusion in what is set to be the blockchain’s first major hard fork in over a year.
Atlantis, which is set to be paired with another forthcoming upgrade called Aghartha, is expected to boost chain interoperability between the ethereum classic and ethereum networks. Kicking off with several EIPs activated on the ethereum blockchain back in 2017, Atlantis marks the first step towards ensuring that the migration of decentralized apps (dApps) from both networks is smooth sailing.
All that being said, yesterday’s decision to recommit to the September hard fork was not reached without controversy and debate between devs.
Conflict Amongst Developers:
Ethereum Classic is hailed as the most infamous and oldest competitor to the ethereum blockchain. Founded in 2016, ethereum classic basically is a version of the ethereum blockchain which didn’t restore stolen funds back to investors after a massive code exploit in the DAO which is a now defunct smart contract based funding vehicle.
Of course, ethereum classic doesn’t even scratch the surface when compared the to $30 billion market cap of ethereum, but it’s still one of the top-performing top 20 altcoins in the world.
Furthermore, ethereum classic devs are hard at work to update the network so that its closer in resemblance to the ethereum blockchain.
Earlier in June, Ethereum Classic Labs, a San Francisco-based firm announced via a blog post, that it intends to implement Atlantis upon the ethereum classic mainnet by July 1 instead of the original proposed date in September. Ethereum Classic Labs is the firm behind the popular software client implementation of ethereum classic dubbed Classic Geth.
However, this decision to push to July 1st occurred due to strong sentiment from both miners and crypto exchanges in Asia who want to see the upgrade happen sooner than September.
Christian Xu, a community manager for the Ethereum Classic Cooperative, stated “People in Asia are eager for this hard fork,” during a call between devs on Thursday. He added:
“In each of our articles, we say that Atlantis will happen on July 1. We did a lot of meetups around cities in China. Even more than 20 cities, we have visited.”
Despite the communication which went out regarding a July 1 hard fork, ethereum classic devs reached a consensus that same day to speed-up testing on the Atlantis hard fork. In light of a fasting testing deadline, several community members cited that the mainnet activation of the hard fork should also be pushed forward and carried out a month earlier than initially planned.
However, other community members including Tang and RoyZou, the founder of Gödel Labs, accused Xu of false claims about the ethereum classic community in Asia.
Tang stated:
“We asked them about Atlantis. We got the normal ‘don’t care’ response, but several exchanges/miners also said that they’re not aware of this before. That makes me feel suspicious.”
Tang and Zou stressed that there has been no pressure from the ethereum classic community in Asia to push forward the hard fork date, but Xu stands by his statement that support for a faster launch in August is what the community wants.
Just last week, members of Ethereum Classic Labs, including CEO Terry Culver, indicated resistance to the idea of delaying an August activation of Atlantis.
Culver stated:
“I strongly disagree. We can’t subscribe to that schedule. We stick to the schedule that we originally agreed upon.”
However, since that call, Culver and the rest of the Ethereum Classic Labs team have joined in on the idea after extended discussions within the community. Just yesterday, Culver’s team released a blog post to the affirm their support of the new hard fork roadmap.
The blog post reads:
“We look forward to our continued cooperation with the ETC community. ETC Labs will work jointly with all developers and teams to successfully complete the hard fork, making ETC stronger.”
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