Ethereum Foundation donates $150,000 to Ethereum Classic – the duo patch up!

On October 30, Ethereum announced a donation of 15,000 ETC to Ethereum Classic Cooperative on Ethereum Special Projects official Medium blog.

This announcement has resulted in the community claiming that the two are back after two years of break-up. Ethereum Classic is a smart contract platform which refers to itself as the original Ethereum as it still runs of the old chain. The roots of the separation go way back to the DAO hack, which resulted in the hard fork and separation of Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.

Decentralized Autonomous Organization [DAO], a smart contract which was based on Ethereum, was hacked and this could have led to the loss of over $50 million. The hacker had taken advantage of the smart contract’s split functionality. However, due to the binding contract, the hacker had to wait for 28 days to withdraw the Ether.

In pursuit of avoiding a successful hack from taking place, the only solution which remained was a hard fork after the consideration of soft fork. This eventually led to a voting system, Carbon Voting wherein the community members decided whether to split the network or not. A majority of the members voted in favor of a  fork, which took place on block 1.9M on July 20, 2016.

Nonetheless, the members were against the hard fork remained on the old chain, naming it Ethereum Classic [ETC]. For almost two years the Ethereum classic showed their disdain towards the hard fork as they considered the move to be against the essential value of the blockchain.

Since then, the two communities have maintained their distance in the cryptocurrency community and also the Ethereum Foundation sold their ETC tokens in the market.

However, the Foundation now claims that their relationship has been better since May 2018, after the Foundation welcomed Anthony Lusardi, Director of ETC Cooperative, to speak about ‘How ETH and ETC can work together’ at the EDCON. This was followed by Ethereum Classic inviting Virgil Griffith to speak on the same at ETC summit.

The blog post read:

“The Ethereum Foundation and the ETC Cooperative are jointly funding Akomba Labs to build the ETH-ETC peacebridge to represent each chain’s transactions on the other. Fracticious yet semi-productive engagement between IOHK’s research team and Ethereum Research on proof of stake consensus algorithm”

In addition to this, IOHK’s Mantis will be supporting Ethereum [ETH]. The blog further added that they found over 15,000 ETC in their cold wallet during a “financial sweep”. To celebrate this event, the Foundation donated the ETC to ETC Cooperative.

Barry Silbert, Founder of Digital Currency Group, said on Twitter:

“The Ethereum Foundation just donated $150,000 (in $ETC) to the Ethereum Classic Cooperative. Thrilled to see bridges being built between the Ethereum and Ethereum Classic communities”