• Ethereum Classic’s Agharta hard fork was successfully activated with block 9,573,000.
• The upgrade added the opcodes for Ethereum’s hard fork Constantinople.

According to etcnodes Ethereum Classic has completed the “Agharta” hard fork on January 12, 2020 at 06:26 UTC. The fork was activated with block 9,573,000. The update will have the same goal as the previous Atlantis update which was implemented in September 2019 to increase the interoperability of Ethereum Classic with Ethereum. Agharta has incorporated the opcodes of the Constantinople and St. Petersburg upgrade to the mainnet of Ethereum Classic.

Ethereum Classic adapts to Ethereum

Commenting on the launch of Agharta’s test network on 14 December, ETC Labs founder James Wo said the upgrade was a good sign for ETC and its ecosystem. He also pointed out the importance of compatibility between the two networks.

According to the developers of the update, Agharta has made the following changes to the ETC mainnet:

• EIP 145 (Bitwise shifting instructions)
• EIP 1014 (Skinny CREATE2 opcode)
• EIP 1052 (EXTCODEHASH opcode)

As mentioned above, the main motivation for the upgrade is to improve the performance of Ethereum Classic by creating better interoperability with the Ethereum clients. In addition, ETC’s developers want to increase the benefits “for all parties” of both blockchains.

Hyperledger Besu, Pariety and Multi Geth have introduced clients that are compatible with the upgrade. However, at the time of the upgrade, 42% of clients were not yet synchronized with Agharta. Bob Summerwill, CEO of ETC Labs, said that the nodes that were not upgraded are part of Classic Geth. These nodes are outside the consensus and will be taken out of service. Regarding the overall update, Summerwill said the following:

The fork apparently went very smoothly (as expected) with a very high rate of node upgrades for Parity-Ethereum and Multi-Geth.

Although Parity is one of the clients who has been disassociating itself from Ethereum, Summerwill said that the opposite is happening with Ethereum Classic. In fact, Parity is one of ETC’s dominant clients.

Next update of Ethereum Classic will be Aztlan

A further upgrade is planned for Ethereum Classic, called Aztlan. The fork has been announced as the link between the Ethereum Classic and the Ethereum hard fork Istanbul. The update has no release date yet, but is expected to be announced within the next months.

Beyond the hard fork, Ethereum Classic recently received good news when the exchange OKEx announced the release of ETC futures on 4 December 2019. The futures are based on Tether and can be traded on a weekly, interweekly or bi-weekly basis.

The price of Ethereum Classic, at the time of publication, is 5.57 USD with a slight downward movement of 1.42% in the last 24 hours. However, Ethereum Classic is still following the general sentiment of the market and records a gain of 18.50% in the weekly chart.

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