On Monday, the developers of the Ethereum Classic (ETC) blockchain announced a hard fork to implement the latest version of the project, which is currently planned for the end of July.

The upgrade, dubbed “Magneto” by the community, will include four Ethereum Improvement Proposals, or EIPs, which were first seen in Ethereum’s Berlin upgrade earlier this year.

These proposals aim to improve the security of the network while saving gas costs by storing addresses and keys in one place so that users can access them with a single transaction.

Beta testing for ETC’s Morder and Kotti test nets began on June 2nd and June 9th, respectively. Magneto Fork will officially run after these tests are completed.

Stevan Lohja, Director of Developer Relations at Mantis – a fully featured wallet and client for Ethereum Classic – told the ETC community:

“To ensure a successful fork, we ask ETC customers to update their node software to a Magneto-compatible version if they have not already done so. If you do not operate any nodes or services, but use ETC via other services, check with this service whether it supports the magneto hard fork. “

Ethereum Classic was originally created under difficult circumstances in 2016. The protocol was diverted from the Ethereum Mainnet (ETH) – an organization of the original decentralized autonomy – due to the $ 60 million hack of a project known simply as “DAO” After mining, the Ethereum developers decided to reverse the malicious transactions in order to circumvent hackers and return the stolen funds to their right owners.

Some believe that reversing these transactions would override one of Ethereum’s core tenets – “rules are laws”. These users feel that it is better to accept losses and learn from the technical errors that allowed hackers to extract funds. As a result, the Ethereum Classic project has split off from Ethereum to preserve what some consider to be the most accurate representation of the project’s blockchain.

In May 2021, some Ethereum Classic enthusiasts jokingly called the project the “fake Ethereum” as the price rose to over 300% – presumably because new crypto traders mistook it for ETH.