The recent Agharta and Phoenix hard-forks speak of a bright future for ETC-ETH compatibility. Core-Geth assures a more secured and more advanced software client for Phoenix update.

The year 2020 seems to be the red-letter year for Ethereum Classic, especially for its mission to enhance interoperability with sister-chain Ethereum. In the bid to boost ETC-ETH compatibility, the ETC blockchain has lined up a series of hard-fork events this year and most of them show excellent promise as well as has earned rave reviews from market experts.

The ETC developer team kickstarted the year with the highly successful Agharta hard-fork (block 9,573,000) on January 12. The upgrade continues the mission of increased ETC-ETH interoperability as was set by Atlantis update last September and has integrated opcodes of St. Petersburg and Constantinople upgrade into Ethereum Classic mainnet. In other words, the January ETC hard-fork signifies the 2nd half ETC-ETH compatibility campaign which commenced in 2019.

OpenETC (a new client), Multi Geth, Pariety (last releases. No future support) and Hyperledger Besu are four of the software clients compatible with the Agharta upgrade. Interestingly, although Pariety is planning to break ties with Ethereum yet it is remaining a key client for ETC. Per the statements of ETC Labs CEO Bob Summerwill, the whole Agartha fork was an extremely smooth affair with an increased rate of node upgrades for Multi-Geth and Parity Ethereum.

ETC followed up the Agharta fork with another major hard-fork that went live on May 31, 2020. Titled “Phoenix”, the upgrade was activated successfully at block 10,500,839. Based on a unanimous consensus among ETC community stakeholders, this system-wide update marks the 3rd hard-fork of the ETC-ETH interoperability initiative.

Geared to enhance ETC’s EVM capabilities, the latest Phoenix hard-fork has also made ETC full compatible with Ethereum. More precisely, the fork has boosted compatibility in between testnet environs of both the blockchains, including Ropsten & Mordor as well as Goerli & Kotti. The upgrade has further duly integrated Istanbul network upgrades into ETC network. Steven Lohja, the tETCnical coordinator of the ETC Core has confirmed the Phoenix update has brought the ETH and ETC Istanbul features as well as tools and use cases for optimum tETCnical compatibility. Despite such strong efforts on interoperability, both the chains will be able to maintain their individual differences.

Both the upgrades signify a key turning curve for ETC, enabling the whole community to gear up for more collaboration, innovation and newer tETCnical contributions to both Ethereum Classic and Ethereum communities. Seasoned crypto experts have welcomed the move and have applauded ETC team’s successful efforts to bolster ETC-ETH compatibility.

Leading crypto pundit Sydney Ifergan shared an extremely positive opinion about the Agharta and Phoenix forks.

“Both the Agharta and Phoenix upgrades are showing stellar performances and hold the prowess to scale up ETC-ETH interoperability to newer heights. What I especially love about these recent developments is that most of their efforts behind their rising success is ‘organic’ and there is no such external push here. Another major factor that cements their viability in ETC-ETH compatibility endeavour is certainly the huge community support behind them. It’s a great development for the crypto scene overall and I would love to be a part of the team”, noted Mr. Ifergan.

The first client for Phoenix fork is Core-Geth which has recently released an advanced version v1.11.0. A state-of-the-art fresh fork of Go Ethereum client, the software stands out better security and more features compared to other Phoenix software clients. A remarkable aspect of Core-Geth is its with versatile range of flavors which enables users to run both ETC, ETH as well as related test-networks.