We are happy to release the ETC Cooperative's Goals and Budget for 2023, and the Annual General Meeting (AGM) resolutions.
The ETC Cooperative enters 2023 in a very strong position financially, technologically, and operationally. We currently hold large cash reserves from the final year of Grayscale funding and a large purchase of ETC during the current bear market.
We now have three core developers and a fully-fledged communications team. This allows us to improve the ecosystem while communicating the benefits more efficiently to the community.
The long-awaited grants program was launched in January in collaboration with our new partners at Bitmain and Antpool. This collaboration has led to another partnership with the Litecoin Foundation for a joint Proof of Work conference in the fall.
With Ethereum’s “The Merge” hard fork and their switch to Proof of Stake, there is now more than ever a clear differentiation between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.
ETC has a majority hash within the Ethash/Etchash mining ecosystem, has more security than at any point in the history of the ETC project, and is now the largest Proof of Work smart contracts blockchain in the world.
Following we present the highlights of our goals for 2023 per category.
Grants Program
In coordination with Bitmain and Antpool, leading companies in the manufacture of mining gear and the proof of work mining pool business, the ETC Grants DAO program was launched in January 2023.
Our key goals and features for the program are:
- Of the total grant investment by Bitmain, Antpool, and the ETC of $10 million, the first round has a total of $1M USD equivalent worth of ETC available across the successful applicants.
- The current round is open until the end of April, with decision-making happening in May; and the payouts starting in June.
- The second round will likely occur later in 2023.
- With Core-Geth and Hyperledger Besu development in-house, we will focus on the higher layers of the ecosystem.
- We will incentivize dapp developers to bring their projects to ETC and for infrastructure providers to bring missing building blocks (DEXs, stablecoins, oracle solutions, bridges) to ETC.
- The full process is detailed at the ETC Grants DAO website, where the application form can be accessed, and all the existing applications can be seen.
- At the time of writing - the end of March 2023 - there are around 40 applications, some in English and some in Chinese.
- Bob Summerwill, our Executive Director, will be spending his time working on grant assessment and support.
- Alison Alexis, our Financial Controller and Business Services Manager, will be spending time on operations and administration of the program.
- The comms team will have ongoing work related to development, delivery, and maintenance of the program as well.
- All of this work is being done through an ongoing collaboration with our partners at Bitmain and Antpool.
POW Summit
We are very happy that following our successful partnership with Antpool, we reached out to the Litecoin Foundation and have been working towards a joint event that we called the POW Summit.
The theme of the event will be Proof of Work and will be bringing together various POW communities around our common cause, with a distinct cypherpunk OG attitude.
The title and headline of the event are "Securing Blockchain's Future, the inaugural Proof-of-Work Summit is a celebration of the world's most effective and secure consensus mechanism."
The summit will take place on the 25th to the 27th of September and some of the key speakers will be:
- Phil Zimmermann, Creator of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP)
- Jameson Lopp, Professional Cypherpunk, www.lopp.net
- Charlie Shrem, Bitcoin Pioneer, CharlieShrem.com
- Charlie Lee, Founder of Litecoin
- Caitlin Long, Founder & CEO of Custodia Bank
- Preston Byrne, Partner at Brown Rudnick LLP
Development
The ETC Cooperative is committed to the ongoing development and maintenance of the Core-Geth client for Ethereum Classic, the current super-majority implementation on the network.
This client is critical for the functioning of the Ethereum Classic blockchain and plays a key role in supporting the ETC community.
Other key highlights of our development goals for 2023 are:
- Due to its low share in the network, we are dropping support of the Hyperledger Besu client
- Blockscout support, we are committed to operate the leading ETC block explorer through 2023
- DappNode is a leading hardware and software node provider, we will provide two new DappNode packages that enable their users to run an ETC node effortlessly
- Decommissioning the Ethereum Classic Kotti (PoA) testnet, we believe this will let us allocate resources more efficiently
- Remove "Modified Exponential Subjective Scoring" (MESS) from Core-Geth client, now that ETC is the majority hash chain in the Ethash/Etchash segment we believe there less risk for a 51%, therefore it is our assessment that we should remove this feature
- We will refactor Core-Geth
- We will conduct experimental investigation and review of other clients
- Add exporting a shared library from Core-Geth for improved modularity
- Continue our efforts for the inclusion of EVM Object Format (EOF) into Ethereum and then add it to ETC
- We will hand over our Ethercluster RPC endpoints to Rivet for more professional management
- Upgrading of the multisig wallet (Safe) to their new frontend (web-core)
- We will be using Ethereum Classic ETL to add chain data to Google BigQuery
- Continue our ongoing chain and network monitoring
Communications and Marketing
The purpose of the ETC Cooperative communications team is to support and promote Ethereum Classic and to keep the ecosystem and the world informed about the ETC Cooperative's projects, finances, and governance.
Following are the key highlights of our comms and marketing plan for 2023:
- The mission of the ETC Cooperative is to steward the development of the Ethereum Classic blockchain.
- Goals: Increase hashrate, usership growth, and development on Ethereum Classic.
- Targets and calls to action: For users "Use ETC for immutable payments, dapps, and storage of value"; developers "Build highly secure solutions and unstoppable dapps on ETC"; miners "Mine on ETC to take advantage of its long-term profitability".
- Brand Story: ETC's messaging will be promotional, selling the attributes of Ethereum Classic, while inviting the world to use it, developers to build on it, and miners to mine on it.
- The messaging around ETC will concentrate on the pillars of Proof of Work, smart contracts programmability, and a capped supply through a fixed monetary policy.
- ETC Values: Decentralization, immutability, censorship resistance, and permissionlessness.
- Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake: We will constantly highlight the difference between the PoS and PoW consensus mechanism and why PoW is more secure.
- The Bitcoin and Ethereum Analogy: We will emphasize the tagline "ETC is BTC philosophy with ETH technology".
- Functions: We will divide our efforts in the functions of marketing, editorial, social media, and events.
- ETC Cooperative's website: The website will be completely overhauled with a new platform, new imagery, style, and messaging.
- Channels: We will use both the community web, video, and social media channels as well as the same resources of the ETC Cooperative.
Corporate Changes, Non-profit Status
During the 2023 calendar year we will begin the process of converting the ETC Cooperative from a public charity into a private operating foundation or a private foundation, due to the lack of diversity of funding sources, which is required to maintain 501(c)3 status. This is called the public support test. The test states that at least 1/3 (33.3%) of donations must be given by donors who give less than 2% of the nonprofit’s overall receipts.
We will be working with our tax advisors to flesh out the requirements for the transition and what effect that will have on the Coop. However, it does not appear that these requirements will result in many operational changes if the status of a private operating foundation can be achieved.
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