The third fork of the Ethereum Classic (ETC) blockchain has taken place, just as the team has announced on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/eth_classic/status/1267296841562861570
The fork occurred at block 10500839 and led to an integration of the Istanbul features that had originally been developed for Ethereum (ETH) in late 2019.
This is the third fork in just one year after Atlantis and Agharta. This one is called Phoenix.
These forks are congruent with the development and agenda that the Ethereum Classic team had set itself to bridge the gap between ETH and ETC across several points.
Looking at the data, it is clear that more than half of the clients are ready, while the rest are still synchronizing.
Meanwhile, as far as exchanges are concerned, many are already prepared for this update, with the exception of the less popular platforms and Kraken, about which for now there is no information about the upgrade. Most of the mining pools are still in the process of being upgraded, as are the various wallets.
The fork has followed the ECIP-1088, and has mainly seen an improvement on the gas side:
- EIP-152: Add Blake2 compression function F precompile
- EIP-1108: Reduce alt_bn128 precompile gas costs
- EIP-1344: Add ChainID opcode
- EIP-1884: Repricing for trie-size-dependent opcodes
- EIP-2028: Calldata gas cost reduction
- EIP-2200: Rebalance net-metered SSTORE gas cost with consideration of SLOAD gas cost change
Users will clearly also have to upgrade and use fork-ready systems to avoid problems, especially since some platforms no longer provide support such as Parity Ethereum and Multi-geth.
The price of Ethereum Classic
Within a few hours, the price of the asset dropped with the fork, from over $7.35 to $6.84, which means the upgrade didn’t help, at least for the time being.
