It will indeed be a Happy New Year for the Ethereum Classic community as ETC Cooperative recently made some positive announcements for the coming year of protocol.

ETC Cooperative, a public charity focused on helping the development and growth of Ethereum Classic, will fund development work for the Core Geth client starting next month, a recently published newspaper announced.

The Core Geth client is an Ethereum protocol provider that enables users to run Ethereum Classic, Ethereum and related test networks using the Go programming language. Geth is the top client managed by the Ethereum network and used by the majority of its user base.

ETC Coop’s announcement indicates that ETC developers Isaac Ardis and Christos Ziogas have signed new agreements with the organization but will continue to work in the ETC core team. Diego López León also belongs to the team. Incidentally, he has been working with ETC Coop since September on the development of the Hyperledger Besu Client, another leading protocol provider for ETC.

The ETC core team will now continue development work for these two customers, with more projects over time, said ETC Coop. “The recent close focus on Core Geth customers is not representative of the team’s history,” it added.

The core team of developers has been an important part of the ETC protocol since it was diverted from the Ethereum network and was instrumental in helping previous Geth customers before Core-Geth was launched in 2020. 

The Core Geth client is a fork of the Go Ethereum client and the main node of the network. It dominates 94.5% over Hyperledger Besu and dominates the remaining 5.5% under the nodes of the network. Core-Geth was previously funded by Ethereum Classic Labs and will now move to ETC Cooperative.

The continued growth of ETC clients is critical to the network as they play a critical role in maintaining network security. The Ethereum protocol recently went through a disastrous hard fork reminiscent of the protocol ETC was created with in 2016 due to a bug in the Geth client used by more than 50% of ETH users.

However, ETC was not as lucky as a miner was also witnessed due to the same bug that caused the network to suffer an unplanned hard fork in September. however, the negative impact on hash and emission rates gave cause for concern for the future.