We are happy to release the ETC Cooperative's Retrospective for 2022.
In 2021 the ETC Cooperative received a windfall of payments from Grayscale before the funding arrangement came to a close in April 2022. We received nearly 10x as much funding in those final 12 months as we had in previous calendar years, leaving the ETC Cooperative sitting on over $5M USD worth of assets at the end of the 2022 calendar year (includes ETC tokens at market value).
Due to this increase in funding the ETC Cooperative has been funding three core developers for all of 2022 who have worked on a variety of technical projects in addition to the Core Geth and Hyperledger Besu clients. All of the technical projects are detailed in the 2022 Retrospective document.
February 2022 saw a smooth network upgrade with the Mystique hard-fork, bringing Ethereum’s “London” protocol changes to Ethereum Classic, with the exception of the EIP-1559 fee market change, which was in conflict with ETC’s fixed monetary policy.
In July we joined forces with Bitmain and Antpool who pledged $10M worth of investment into the ETC ecosystem. That funding has come to fruition in the form of the ETC Grants DAO program which was launched in January 2023.
In September, Ethereum made its long awaited transition to Proof-of-Stake (POS) with “The Merge”. The transition to Proof of Stake was smooth for that network. It was also smooth for the Ethereum Classic network which accepted a large slice of the hashrate of Ethereum miners. At one point the spike was as much as a 10x rise in hashrate, but has settled back to a sustained rate in the 115-130 TH/s band.
ETC is now the largest Proof of Work smart contracts blockchain in the world and the majority hash chain within the Ethash family, thus the safest it has ever been from 51% attacks.
In November, the Cooperative strengthened its position further with the addition of a fully fledged communications team. This team has been hugely effective and given us the kind of marketing impact which we had been missing. That team includes Chinese translation, and as of their November start date all of the Cooperative’s communications have happened simultaneously in English and Chinese, finally helping to bridge the Cooperative’s part in the East-West divide within Ethereum Classic which was first identified in 2019.
We enter 2023 in a very strong position.
Following are highlights of the 2022 Retrospective report.
Development and Infrastructure
The ETC Cooperative continues to fund critical infrastructure for the ETC including Core-Geth client, Hyperledger Besu client, BlockScout block explorer, and Public RPC endpoints.
Two new developers were incorporated to the team, Isaac Ardis and Chris Ziogas, who will be working with Diego López León on client development, upgrades, and maintenance and other key projects for Ethereum Classic such as:
- The BlockScout explorer, the most widely used explorer for ETC
- Safe wallet implementation, the most popular multisignature wallet in the EVM segment
- The ETC node explorer, a monitor of ETC nodes with version and regional coverage stats
- The ETC orphan tracker, a read-only user interface for an application tracking orphan blocks on Ethereum Classic
- Cross-client testing
- DiscV4 DNS Registry, a service provides Ethereum Classic nodes with the IP addresses of other nodes
- VHC (Validated Header Context for transactions) and TABS (Total Active Balance Synthesis) research
- Supporting implementation and testing of EVM Object Format (EOF) upgrade
- Research and experimental work on the Erigon and Geth+ETC clients
- Maintenance of the ETC client packages on DappNode, a leading blockchain hardware node provider
Communications and Marketing
The marketing and communications strategy for ETC Cooperative in 2022 focused on raising awareness about the benefits of using Ethereum Classic (ETC) and the cooperative's role in supporting the ETC ecosystem. In late 2022 we took steps to resolve this situation by hiring a communications team.
Our new team members are Donald McIntyre, a 10 year blockchain veteran who will be Senior Editor, Andrew Dick, a tech comms and marketing expert who will be Marketing Manager, Angelah Liu, a Masters of Global Affairs degree holder with experience in Web 3 and the cryptocurrency OTC industry who will be Social Media Manager, and Emma Todd, a mining expert, public speaker, and CEO of MMH Technology Group who will be Events Manager.
The key comms and marketing activities for 2022, which will be extended to 2023 and onwards, were:
- Nearly all of our activity is published and promoted in English and Chinese
- We published 17 articles on the ETC Cooperative website and Medium blog, and 4 videos on the YouTube channel
- We contributed 16 articles to the ETC community website, and 16 videos to the community YouTube channel
- Dealt with a dispute for the @eth_classic Twitter handle that Charles Hoskinson, CEO of IOHK, maliciously transferred to another blockchain project
- We contributed 13 tweets to the @eth_classic and @etc_network Twitter community accounts
- We created the ETC Weekly Review, which is a show that discusses the posts of the week
- Reactivated and sent 8 newsletters
- Participated in many of the 31 ETC community calls for the year
Financials
We report that overall, F2022 actual costs were $640K less than budgeted. The main differences were lower development costs (by $300K) and delaying the grant program to 2023 ($250K).
Budgeted development costs consisted of 2 more developers; however, it was determined that a core team of 3 developers, with added contractors would meet the current needs of the Coop.
A Grant program was launched in January 2023, with the Coop committed to contributing $250K.
F2022 costs were significantly higher than F2021 due to the hiring of 2 core developers, as well as a new communications team near the end of F2022.
Conferences and travel resumed in 2022, with several of the team members representing the ETC Cooperative and ETC Community at various events during the year. Most of the team traveled to DevCon 2022 in Colombia, which allowed the remote team to collaborate altogether in person for the first time.
March 2022 was the last month in which the ETC Cooperative earned fees from Grayscale as the 2-year agreement came to an end. The crypto bull run left the Coop with $5.2M to start F2022 (including ETC tokens at market value), which provides us a few years of runway.
At the end of F2022 and into early 2023 the ETC Cooperative began to invest some of its cash reserves into ETC, as we consider the prices depressed, in hopes of extending the runway.
The cash position of the ETC Coop at the and of F2022 was of $5,144,585, which includes a $328,265 position in ETC.
Thank you for reading this article!
To learn more about the ETC Cooperative go to: https://etccooperative.org
To learn more about ETC go to: https://ethereumclassic.org