Justice

0:03Welcome and introductions

IstoraHello and welcome to Ethereum Classic Community Call number 59. Today is Friday, September 11th, 2026. We are going to skip the preamble this week, because we've got a very special call, and we are joined by some VIP guests this week. Let's start off just by saying hello to everyone on the call. Hello there, we've got Diego. 0:27

DiegoHey, Istora, how are you? Thank you for… for having this. Yeah, I hope we have a good call. 0:36

IstoraThanks for joining, as always, and yeah, good to hear your voice again. Kevin, you are also on the call. Welcome back. 0:44

KevinThank you for welcoming me back, I'm happy to be back. 0:48

IstoraYeah, we can probably go into a bit more about Kevin's story. He's been a long-time OG and contributor to ETC. And we can get more into that. So thanks again for coming back, Kevin. And we also have Jennifer. 1:08JenniferHello everyone, I'm Jennifer from ETC Grants DAO, yeah. 1:15

IstoraThanks, Jennifer, for joining us as well.

1:17Introducing Classix and ETC Grants DAO

1:17

IstoraOkay, so as I said, it's a bit of a special call this week. We had to skip the last call because myself and Diego were speaking at Bitmain's World Digital Mining Summit Conference in Hong Kong. We were invited to take part in a panel discussion, and myself and Diego used the opportunity to finally go public as founders of a new startup called Classix. That's Classix with an X. Classix has been in the works since Cody announced that the ETC Cooperative was shutting down. And we're excited to finally be able to talk about it. The community call will stay the same as always. But in the respect of time of our guests, I just wanted to… request that you excuse me for bumping this conversation to the start of the call, so I can explain a bit more upfront. Classix is an open-source development agency building and maintaining infrastructure for Ethereum Classic, and our mission is to support Diego's work with client maintenance, sustaining critical infrastructure, and engaging the wider ETC community to help grow the project. Basically, as the co-op is shutting down, we're trying to organize, pick up the pieces in terms of development, infrastructure, and community building in ETC. We think it's important to maintain protocol neutrality, just like with Bitcoin. This is always done without a protocol layer tax, and through voluntary funding. Me and Diego have a deep track record of contributing to ETC, and we don't want to watch the project lose its soul or slow down just because one of the proposals is controversial. Just like in nature, we feel like this is why it's so important that the project does not pick winners at the protocol layer, and lets market competition decide which teams get funding, and allow all kinds of contributors to contribute. In the last 6 months, we've been in close contact with ETC Grants DAO. And we're deeply appreciative of their support. Classix wouldn't be where it is without them. And on this call, we are joined by Jennifer from the ETC Grants DAO, who we met at WDMS. And it was a pleasure to meet you there in Hong Kong, Jennifer. Thanks again for joining us, and I believe you wanted to say a few words about ETC Grants DAO, and Classix. 3:36JenniferHmm, hello? 3:38

IstoraHi, Jenny. 3:39JenniferOkay, hi everyone, thanks in… thank you, Istora. Thank you for inviting me here. I'm Jennifer from ETC Grants DAO, just wanted to share where we are. ETC Grants DAO has been in discussion with Classix for some time now, and our NDA is signed, and the MOU is going through our internal process. We're working to get it done. Yes, as Istora said, we had the pleasure to inviting you and the Diego to speak at WDMS, our Mining Summit in Hong Kong last month. We were happy to give you the platform, and we really appreciate the work you're doing. We see value in having a sustainable path for ETC's core development and the infrastructure, and we hope to continue supporting this direction. So, that's all from me. Thanks, everyone. 4:41

IstoraThanks, Jennifer, and I know time is limited, so feel free to jump off at any time, but once again, thank you so much to you and Lulu, as well as ETC Grants DAO and Bitmain for their continued support for Ethereum Classic. We really appreciate it. 4:56JenniferThanks, thanks to you. Istora. 5:01

IstoraYeah, we are looking forward to working together with all ETC contributors and aligned interests as Classix and Ethereum Classic, grows together, and we are honoured to take the responsibility and the privilege to keep things going, so… The next big announcement, I guess, is, that we have two other VIPs on the call.

5:26Kevin is back

5:26

IstoraI guess we should talk about Kevin Lord, who's come back. Hi, Kevin. 5:32

KevinHey, Istora. 5:35

IstoraSo… Just for context… For the people that are just listening to Ethereum Classic in the last, like, few years, could you give a bit of background on how you've been contributing to ETC in the past, and what we've been working on in the last few weeks, and your specialties, and how we can, you know. Take the next steps in growing the project, once again. 6:03

KevinYeah, of course. So, my name is Kevin, some of you know me by Classic Kevin. I've already run into a lot of familiar faces in the community channels and the Discord, which has been great. But, for those who don't know, I've been involved with ETC a few months before the ETC Summit in Hong Kong in 2017. And that's where I joined IOHK and became their community manager for ETC, running the social channels and the, ETC Twitter. And then did the same thing for the ETC Cooperative, and I am hoping to do the same… we're gonna go do the same, here with Classix. I took some time away to deal with some family stuff, but I'm back, and honestly, the timing feels right. We're working on a lot of, amazing things at… Classix, and, I feel like right now is the perfect time for me to return. Yeah, we'll be, handling most of the social media, sort of transitioning, some people out there are calling, you know, ETC a dead project, and I want to help change that, so… I'm working with Istora and, you know, Classix on the social side, starting with Ethereum Classic Twitter, to bring back, like, a consistent voice. And getting this community thriving again. I want to see it back… return back to how it used to be. We used to be a very, very active community, and I 100% believe we can get back to that point in time. Yeah, so, we have a lot of, great things to accomplish. 8:05

IstoraI couldn't agree more, and your timing is impeccable. When you joined that Discord discussion, I was so happy and surprised to see you, and I was like, oh my god, this is the perfect time for Kevin to get back and, help. with exactly your specialty, which is getting the word out, and on the topic of the ETC Twitter account, the @eth_classic. It was basically silent for the last 8 months, partly because there was a bit of a deadlock in the, Twitter Together pull request system. Partly because a lot of the energy was not there because of the whole Olympia debate, but I think we have finally passed that, and we're now able to start making progress on that. And, for the public record, it's recently… been… so the @eth_classic account has recently been transferred to the ownership of Classix, so… It was previously held by Bob Summerwill of the cooperative, and now we're in control of that account. We're still going to run through all the tweets through the transparent Twitter Together process for transparency. And approvals via that system, but… People should know that this is currently the new situation. And, we are happy to pick up the torch on both the client maintenance front. And supporting that work, but also, almost as importantly. Some could say, more importantly, the… memetic ordnance front, getting the message out and, getting people aware of and engaged with the project for ETC. Because that's what drives interest, and that's what drives adoption. And eventually, that translates into security for the protocol. 9:55

KevinYes, the social layer. 9:57

IstoraYep, exactly. And I might argue that there's even one layer below the social layer, which is the philosophy layer. And that one is missing on many different chains, and I don't think Ethereum mainnet has that, but ETC definitely does, so… There's like a… they… I guess, on the Ethereum side, they say layer 0 as the social layer, but we could say we have a layer negative 1. But perhaps we could come up with something more interesting than that.

10:27Marek on proof of work and agentic systems

10:27

IstoraI noticed on the call we have a… another guest? Marek? Are you… Able to talk? 10:38MarekHmm, can anyone hear me? 10:40

IstoraYeah. 10:42MarekYeah, so, I don't know if anyone kind of knows me, I've been actually following Ethereum Classic right from the very start. I was actually mining it, once, I guess, it was Bitmain… it was, not Bitmain, sorry, some… there was a few miners, including Chandler Guo, who picked it up. A long time ago. And, you know, I've been following it for a long time, very interested to hear these kind of new developments, very supportive of, you know, what y'all are doing and building. I'm very interested in kind of coming back, and I've been a builder in the Ethereum space. But now I'm kind of, you know, interested to see these sort of new developments and maybe contribute something. I used to actually be a professor of data science, and I have a background in multi-agent systems, actually. And I noticed, like, some people talking about, you know, the unique advantages of PoW, sort of, like, vis-a-vis, you know, like, sort of agentic systems, right? And so I wanted to explore that a little bit more. I tried to talk to people at the cooperative a while ago now, but it was… it was sort of kind of apparent, I think, that things were kind of maybe disintegrating there, but so I'm glad to see y'all are picking up the torch, so… yeah, just wanted to pop in and say hi, and yeah, I'll just fade into the background unless anyone needs me. 12:03

IstoraWell, thanks for joining. It's always good to hear new voices on the call. I'm very much intrigued with your take on the PoW agentic systems, because I've also been thinking about this. But I want to hear what your, what's the edge, do you think, for PoW? 12:22MarekYeah, I think that, you know, there's something… to me, there's something interesting to explore, right? And right now, I think it's at the sort of exploratory stage, although I've been thinking about it for a little while, where, you know, to me, there seems to be something interesting at the intersection of you know, agents that, are running on sovereign hardware? Right? And being able to, like, do things like fund their own activities by, let's say, turning off, or turning the dial, right, between… you know, intelligence versus, like, mining cryptocurrency to pay other agents to do things, right? So, like, I think it's… part of it is, I think, like a narrative thing, right? So much… so much in the crypto space, you know, is sort of, like, narrative-driven. You mentioned the meme canon earlier, right? This sort of thing, right? Certainly, I think it tells an interesting story that ETC has that I guess, you know, Ethereum's so-called mainnet does not. 13:25

IstoraRight. I think the… to kind of crystallize the way I think about this is that proof of work is permissionless, and you don't need permission from someone holding ETC to… That's true. Right, and… and agents are… you know, part of that story. There's also something deep within Ethereum Classic law and history that most people are not familiar with, which is the founding documents, and I believe it's in… either the Decentralist Manifesto or the Declaration of Independence. Where it's specifically outlined that ETC is refrigerator-friendly. Meaning that both humans and non-humans alike should be able to use ETC without any limitations. Like, it's not just built for… for whatever the social layer decides is okay, it's like a truly unstoppable platform. So, yeah, I think there are many… beyond that, the whole quantum thing, and complications in the future with proof of stake, and… I really like your… thing about switching from different, algorithms between mining to generate ETC and, like. compute to decide things. And you can imagine, like, just a… a shipping container next to a… some kind of source of energy, stranded energy, that's both mining and thinking at the same time. And I think… Right, sure. Yeah. Really cool concept. 15:12MarekThanks, thanks. Yeah, I'd be interested to, like, you know, maybe unpick this, like, another day. 15:19

IstoraYeah, for sure. 15:19MarekYou wanna circle back on it, yeah. 15:21

IstoraIf you're… if you're not already in the Discord, or one of the Discords, then please make yourself known, and I'd love to get into some deeper discussions. And I think we're gonna… 15:31MarekHey, you know, on that topic, I'm not… I have Discord, I'm not a huge Discord enjoyer, I've actually had a great summer kind of unplugging it, but, you know, it's probably worth it. It's worth the effort, I think, to kind of get plugged in, especially with these new developments. One of the things that I think, you know, is the Discord, like, pinned off of Twitter? Because, like, how does one even… I've clicked on so many fake Discord links, right? I'm just looking at your Twitter right now. Is it, is it pinned there? On the ETC… Ethereum Classic Twitter? 16:03

IstoraIt's on the website, it's on the website. Okay. So, this is actually one of the topics of this, on the agenda this week, which is the… There was a recent pull request merged for the website that… so basically, there are two Discords. There's quote-unquote legacy, it's not really legacy, but it's just the… the original Discord server running since 2016. And then there's a new Discord server that was launched, last year in November. Which is more tightly moderated, and, yeah. Basically, there's two choices, but, I'm mostly on the… the original Discord server. We're also looking at, like, starting a Matrix channel for ETC? To add additional sovereignty, so we're not relying purely on Microsoft hardware and Discord, because, yeah. It's always good to diversify. And I can see the… 17:05MarekI can… if I can reflect on that, you paused and invited comment, as an old head. There's nothing broken about IRC, by the way. like, there's… I was on the Bitcoin IRC, I think there was an Ethereum IRC, like, way, way back in the day. People just post links to the images, and you just have to, like, click the link instead of it rendering in the thing. Maybe it does that automatically nowadays, I have no idea, right? But, that… I don't know. Just saying. That'd be cool, too. Yeah. 17:33

IstoraIt would be cool, and actually, it would be very possible to bridge all of these different platforms together. Matrix is kind of designed for that, with its federation, and we could have, like, an ETC IRC that links with a channel in the Discord, as well as the Matrix. That would be pretty. 17:52MarekOkay. I could attempt to, if you need one, I could attempt to, like, moderate the IRC channel. I've done it before, again, that's been decades now, but yeah, just throw my hat in there. I reached out on Twitter, by the way, if you want to follow me back, maybe we can connect on Twitter. 18:09

IstoraFor sure, for sure. It's awesome to have, to have you on board. And I can see that Brolal… 18:16MarekI've been on board since 2016. 18:20

IstoraOkay, on board in the shadows. Yeah, many of us have as well. The best kind. But thanks, thanks for staying on board in that case. And I… 18:34

KevinYeah, great to know you're actually here.

18:41The rebrand with lal

18:41

IstoraI just wanted to, invite Brolal to say hello. He's on the call now? 18:52

lalHello guys, how are you? 18:55

IstoraHey, Brolal, good to hear you again. I'm doing well. 19:01

lalI've joined a bit late, but I'm happy to be here. 19:07

IstoraThat's no problem at all. We were just about to… move on to the topic of this, this new rebranding push that you've been helping with. And I think that would be, call to… talk about, in terms of everyone on this call. Probably can provide a bit of feedback about what we think we should be doing in terms of the narrative of ETC, and the website, and how it's framed to new people. This ties in the Twitter, the website, the Discord, and everything, basically. It's kind of… like, we need a North Star, I think, for this new, sort of, chapter in ETC, and… Yeah, we have, if you are listening on the call, there is a link… there will be a link in the YouTube description to the Community Call website. And you'll see in the agenda that, there are some generated images. Of a potential… brand identity narrative going forward that Brolal has kindly contributed, and we're looking forward to developing this idea. Kevin, Diego, and Brolal were all contributing together, and we would definitely enjoy it if others in the community were reaching out if they have any ideas and feedback on our approach. 20:43

KevinYeah, any feedback is appreciated, for sure. 20:52

lalWell, the main… the main reason… reason behind this is that we would like to have, like, a unified identity. Which has the same style on… most channels? And the… once it's ready, we can, let it go and, see how, how… if it gets any traction, and if, users likes… likes it, then, move… move forward from there. It is important to… to try to have, like, a more professional approach when it comes to messages. Because ETC is a state-of-the-art technology, and we should… try to take a better care when it comes to, public image, or… or the content that is being provided for the users and for anyone interested in ETC. 22:04

IstoraVery much agreed. And, I think we have the opportunity now to… Take what was previously kind of fragmented and… disjointed. Approaches to design. And, create, like, a brand identity. I believe this was done a few years ago in the Phoenix project, but we can try and… I guess, rejuvenate the Phoenix project in spirit, and take this forward with a new brand identity. Which you should be seeing, rolled out in the next few months. And ideally, we will be launching a new website before Devcon in Mumbai, India. Which is November of this year. So, we're working hard on that. And if anyone wants to help out, please, reach out, either on Discord or Twitter, or just make yourself known. 22:55

lalOne thing that I wanted to add is that these materials will be public available. So, it would be easy for anyone who would like to participate to… Get these materials, these references. And, if they have, like, a good idea, and would like to participate, and have, like, a bit of, designer skills, and would like to help out, they will have, like, starting point, like a starting pack. In this matter, so that would be interesting to see, oh, how it goes. 23:48

IstoraDefinitely, and I will also mention that the Ethereum Classic Twitter account is a kind of semi-open platform where anybody can contribute tweets. There's an application called etc.contributor.app. You can see a pinned tweet on that Twitter account. Which gives you instructions on how to submit ideas for tweets that will go through an approval process, but will help us meme. ETC. So, if you have any ideas, please check that out.

24:22core-geth release and ETC news

24:22

IstoraWe… we kind of, skipped around a bit on the agenda, but I wanted to make sure we have enough time to talk about the… the recent update to core-geth, and Diego, as you're on the call, perhaps you could give a quick update on the latest release, and requesting that people update their nodes for core-geth, is that right? 24:44

DiegoYes, yes, thank you for mentioning that, because, yeah, I haven't been here since the last release. Yeah, it's a… it's an important one, I think. With this latest release, we finish, or we… pardon the… the fix for one of the security vulnerabilities that we had there. We already had been… mostly protected, but with this last one, I think, we closed, every… every possibility of any denial of service within the network. So, yeah, it's important for people to… to keep up to this. So, it's published into the GitHub release page, it's also published into the Docker Hub. So, it's quite easy to… to upgrade, and… of course, I mean, it's always… a good recommendation for people to compile their own versions and to check everything before deploying this kind of stuff. But, either way, for the regular user that doesn't want to go through all that. Yeah, everything is there. So yeah, thank you for mentioning that. 25:58

IstoraOf course, and just on a bit of background for this release, a few, I think. several weeks ago, Kimi K3 was the first, like, high-level LLM that was able to find all kinds of new vulnerabilities was released to the public. And Classix ran a kind of pen test against one of the clients, core-geth, which is the main one that's been used, and it found some potential, denial of service vectors, which are… not utilized, but would be good to patch, and we… we implemented a fix, and ran it past a few other developers before releasing, and came up with this, core-geth release under the Ethereum Classic… sorry, the etclabscore organization. So, yeah, if you're running core-geth, please update, and let's keep Ethereum Classic up to date. On the development front, there were also some other… Unfortunately, the Fukuii guys are not joining these calls recently, so I did notice there's a lot of commits on Fukuii, but I'm not really sure how to interpret them. It'd be great if they could join a call in the future to… to let us know what's going on with updates. I noticed that there were two… pull requests, they got merged for ECIP-1111 and ECIP-1112 related to Olympia. It seems Olympia has had quite a major overhaul in the last week, so it'd be great to hear from the authors about what that entails. As far as I can tell, it seems like the… ECIP-1112, the Treasury contract now has, like, an admin upgrade path, so it'd be great to understand more about what the plan is on the Olympia front, from the authors. They're always welcome to discuss. I also opened a pull request on the ECIPs repo to enable preview deploys. This will help us check that any… changes to the ECIPs repo are rendering correctly before they get merged into main. as I talked about briefly before, we did also merge a pull request into the ethereumclassic.org website, which… changes the single Discord link to a page that lists all of them. So, in case there's more than one Discord, there's no longer a single recommended one, so people can join both and or decide which one they want to join. There were also two new apps added to the ETC website, i.e. EIDEX and ETCMCv2 DEX. And, yeah, I haven't tried these out, but worth looking at if you're interested in, the growing ETC ecosystem. So, I think that covers all of the things I had on the agenda. Let's open the floor up, and if there's anything that anyone on the call wants to talk about, let's just… let's just shoot the shit.

29:24Where should core-geth live?

29:24

DiegoYeah, there's something, that I think we never mentioned in these calls about, something that involves me, that it's, the etclabscore repository, where core-geth lands. There have been some attempts to move it into the Ethereum Classic organization. There was, actually, a pull request on the… on the site. For doing that, the conversation is… it's open, I think, still there, but yeah, so I just wanted to… to make here, on the record, like, my position about that. It's… I think it's pretty clear they are in the… in the discussion, but, either way, for me, I think, like, moving the repository to Ethereum Classic will give the wrong signal to the community, given that, one of the headlines of Ethereum Classic is that there is nothing kind of official on Ethereum Classic, and this is, like, a joint effort for many different parties. So, in that case, Ethereum core-geth, it's just an implementation of an specification, and for that specification, we actually have a… pretty… good process, I could say. Sometimes it gets a bit slow, but, overall, it seemed to be working, and that's why it actually lives in the Ethereum Classic repository, and I think that makes sense, because it's, like. Take… social agreement, let's say, or the hard consensus, it's there. But, every other implementation, which is kind of opinionated, because, I mean, every developer can implement it in the way they prefer, I think those should live outside of… of that org. Kind of, like, signaling official. organization. So I don't know, I think that's something that we never mentioned before, that's my… my thought about it, and that's why I… I opposed to… to changing the… the recommended repository to… for downloading the releases. I don't know if anyone else has… I thought about this. 31:54

lalI just wanted to ask you, what's your long-term view? Because… it's pretty clear the current state is not, like, the best oh… out there, so… ideally, we… we would have, like, a plan for… for maybe a long-term maintenance, where other… other developers may want to join our repo, which is somehow official, right? So, ideally, long-term, where… where it should sit, the repository. 32:36

DiegoOh, yeah. I think the repository is… it's okay where it is. With regards maintenance, I think, the… path forward is the same as in every other open source project, and moreover, in a project that is basically so… set up over trust, and so for any regular project or open source project, you have to… get some reputation, so you have to collaborate there, you have to be open, you have to be, you know, like, being there, like, showing that you have knowledge, and you have real interest on supporting the platform. These days, it's a bit more complicated than before, just… like, distinguishing which one is a real person and which one is an AI, and maybe nowadays will take more time than before just to check the people that are behind some contributions. But, I think the mechanisms will be the same. So, it will be great to have more real pull requests from people that are interested into the development of what, in this case, core-geth, or any other project that we develop in the open. But I think the process is just that. Be there, show up, contribute. Be a voice there, and be really interested in… in the… in the product itself. So, hopefully, that's something that will happen. Nowadays, maintaining core-geth, it's a bit challenging, that's why… we have been trying to push into the direction of having new clients. Well, I think I said it. a few times before, but, well, we already have a really good plugin for Nethermind. It's really good, I think it works pretty well. The good thing about that is that its footprint is really small, so it's around… 2,000 lines of code for adding Ethereum Classic support to Nethermind. The performance is really good, so it's way easier to maintain, like, a footprint of 2,000 lines of code than, I don't know, like. high. I don't even know, but I'll say, like, 50,000 lines of core-geth. So… and I think I'm staying short there. But, so yeah, so that's another… another way to collaborate, like, like, using… 35:19

lalMore clients, testing those. What's mine. Sorry. Sorry, to cut… to just cut there, so what you are saying is that, ideally, we would have, like, baseline team of developers before we can think about having a dedicated repo for, maintenance and everything. Is this what is missing to, you know, have, like, a… like, a dedicated, you know, community repo. We are… the… the actual people to… to… 36:09

DiegoI don't think… I don't think we need… I mean, I don't think the participation in the repo will change where the repo should land. That's my perspective there. That's what I tried to say at the beginning. So, every client will… will carry… will come with a kind of opinion from the developer that put it in place. What has to be neutral is the specification, and that's what lives into this quote-unquote official Ethereum Classic Organization. Everything else, I think it's… it's okay to live in their own organization and repository, given that it's just, like, a private or personal endeavor to implement or maintain those, those things. 37:07

lalLet's see, yeah. 37:10

IstoraYeah, this also provides, like, additional decentralization advantages, like, if… if there are disagreements about how a particular thing should be implemented in one of the clients, then it can simply be forked. And if one stops being maintained, then people can simply use a different one. Whereas if there's, like, an official, blessed client, then… it actually creates a lot of… problems in terms of how you decide what goes into that client. And you're basically making decisions on behalf of the people that are running the clients, instead of allowing them to decide neutrally. 37:52

DiegoYeah, and I think that's what's great on open source, and well, overall, I think blockchains also, because if you create a new client and it's out of consensus, it will not be there. So, on blockchains, we have these two great things, that we can fork, and at the same time, we can demonstrate that our new client it's still being part of the network. So, yeah, forking is always great. So, yeah, work on every fork out there. 38:23

IstoraAnd just for reference, we mean forking the client codebase, not necessarily… 38:27

DiegoYes. Yeah, yeah. 38:30

IstoraAlthough that's also open if there's. 38:32

DiegoYeah. 38:33

Istoralike. To the point that we need to split. But, I'm hoping… I'm pretty confident now that's not gonna happen. And this does kind of, yeah. deciding, like, the ECIP process is basically the closest thing to official, where the, the specification gets decided, and beyond that, I don't think there needs to be any other like… official implementation. Because then people are free to experiment and come up with their own things, as long as they adhere to this, like, very core and well-defined specification, which is… largely just a bunch of EIPs that are specified upstream. 39:23

DiegoYeah, and also, usually, open source projects are not, tied to the same consensus as a blockchain, or as a set of, of, like, a specification of the ECIP process. Usually the decision process within Open source community… open source softwares are that, basically based on meritocracy, or… or maybe just being there, or gaining the trust of the maintainers, or things like that. This has been working for many years in many different projects, and I think it's… that's… that's okay. Maybe there are some different ways of, governance for those, but, so far, I think that's the… the one that have been… been mostly used out there. But anyway, any new project can have their own governance. So far, that's the one that we are following, as I was saying before. The way to… to becoming a maintainer, it's like, showing up there, showing your interest, showing your value, showing that you care about, the software, and bringing new ideas, and being there for… for discussions. I think I'm reachable. My email, my… social networks are… I don't have many, but all of those are open, but public, and yeah, I'm in the Discord, so anyone that's interested can just ping me.

40:56Paying gas in stablecoins

40:56

lalI wanted to bring up a topic that I saw online, maybe you guys heard of it. There is a draft… a draft proposal. Where Ethereum would allow users to pay for gas in stablecoins. Do you guys know more, or about that, or… Do you find it interesting? 41:23

DiegoYeah, it's, it's really interesting. It's, you're talking about, frame transactions, I think. It's a really interesting concept. I've been, like, trying to… get more into it. So far, I think it is interesting. I don't see it… I mean, at least the selling point. It's a bit similar to what EIP-7702 was. I think this is more powerful. But, the thing about this… proposals, and I hope this gets into future hard forks. But it's about adoption. What happened with EIP-7702 is that, like, there are no many wallets already using it. What did, what did… what did, bring… broke to the table? was really, really interesting, and talking about, like, being able to set a code for your external account, so you could execute those before. calling some other smart contracts, so the… the mechanism for EIP-7702 was really, really powerful, but has not been, like, widely, widely used, and didn't… didn't bring to the table, I think, all the benefits that had been said. But that was because of adoption. My main fear with, this new one, is… I don't remember the number, 41… something. My main fear is that it will happen the same, that there will be no widely adoption. But either way, it's really important, and… and with regard to Ethereum Classic. One of the problems… problems with, new transactions coming from… the regular Ethereum is that… most of them relies on concepts that belongs to EIP-1559. That's why we were looking forward to first add those concepts into the protocol, in the most lean way possible, which is, like, the Type 3 transactions. So, before jumping into any of these new more new, transactions. types. So… So yeah, it would be great to have, some of those. into Ethereum Classic, but first, I think we need to… to have some… some sort of EIP-1559, so we could use the same… the same concepts into new… into these new transaction types. I don't know if I was clear. 44:12

IstoraYeah, it makes sense to me, and I… what is the difference here between the, sort of. The gas station concept, where you can sort of do a meta-transaction that someone else pays for the gas. 44:28

DiegoYeah, well, I think the problem there is that that's a… it's like using a convention. That's the thing about gas station networks and all that. And these new things will be part of the protocol itself. So I think that's the main difference. 44:47

IstoraInteresting. Do you know much about the details of this, in terms of how they, like, is it any token that you can pay with, and how do miners determine, like, the exchange rate for the… 45:03

DiegoNo, I don't know. I don't know, probably, yeah, no, I don't know, I… I've been thinking that probably this will work, like, maybe sending to a DEX? And they are, like, in the same transaction, and you will be able to exchange your stable or any other token into actual gas, because the gas is not going to change. So, maybe that's the part, but the mechanism itself is quite open. So, you can do whatever you want there. 45:40

IstoraYeah, I do see the… there's a big user experience issue with people that want to use Ethereum with stablecoins, where they receive some stablecoins, but they can't send it, because they have no Ether. So, this solves quite a big UX problem. 45:55

DiegoYes. Yes. 45:59

lalIt also offers a lot more flexibility for users. I think this is what I found… find most interesting. It gives another option, for, everyone to use it. So, I was a bit amazed they had this drafted. Overall, the most important part is to… to have, like, the… the… these options for… for users to… to engage with, and… everyone can find, you know. Can get most best results in terms of cost and everything. 46:53

DiegoYes. Yeah, no, no, it will be great, but also, it will depend also in the… implementations of the adoption of wallets, for example. That's, one of the things that happened with EIP-7702, that wallets didn't adopt it as the… the… the fight… they're… the authors of the EIP expected, so… Yeah, in the end, it will depend on wallets. 47:23

lalIf it has economical reasoning, and could be, you know… better in terms of costs? I don't see why… they wouldn't go for it. 47:43

DiegoYeah, no, and also, in these days where, like. sometimes developing software had become a commodity. It has… it had to be easier. Than before, so it's just a new feature, and if people use it, it's good, and if they don't, okay, you can leave it die. I mean, it has not been as much as an investment to add this new feature. But, yep. Hopefully, it will get an adoption, and they will implement it in the best way possible. It will be really, really positive for the user inter… the user experience of blockchains. 48:26

IstoraYeah, it's cool, and… at the same time, like, there are workarounds, like, why not just send a bit of Ether along with the… with the stablecoin if the address has none? That could also be, like, a… a backwards compatible solution. And there are always ways to… improve UX, and adding additional complexity. This goes into an ongoing debate in ETC about, like. Should we always be trying to, like, layer on these additional features when… ossifying and… like, removing the need to… do these kind of hard forks, is also an option. So… just putting that out there. Am I… am I correct in believing that there's been a bit of drama in the Ethereum Mainnet world recently. maybe around this EIP or something similar? I'm not really following… Twitter drama, but I heard something on the grapevine. 49:42

DiegoI don't remember. No, I may have missed it. 49:49

IstoraOkay, maybe that was just something else. There's always kind of drama happening. I just wanted to… give a chance for Joon Hye, who just joined as a guest to speak, if they're wanting to. If you want to introduce yourself, feel free, otherwise… We can continue. Okay, just a chat message, just here to listen. Well, thanks for joining, Joon Hye. Hope to see you in another call. Alright. Is there anything else, to talk about this week? There are some potential if-there's-time topics, we were talking a lot, Diego, in… in Hong Kong about… dealing with the quantum threat and potential supplement contracts and that kind of stuff. So, before we go into that, is there anyone on the call that would like to bring up a topic for general discussion?

51:02Besu support and Triforce

51:02

DiegoNo, just, short notice on something that I've been working on for the last, we'll say, yeah, few months, is that, for adding like, for re-adding support to Ethereum Classic, for Ethereum Classic to Besu, I'm… I haven't found the right way of, pull requests, I've been playing with different options. All of them work well, as a… like, new layer for adding plugins that touches, like, hard consensus, but… I'm not… I'm still not convinced that's the best shape for sending the pull request, so I have a… my own branch working on this, like, trying to… to find the right way to make this suitable for a pull request, so that's something I'm… working on, quite heavily, when I have time. So, if anyone is interested on helping that, on giving the final shape to that pull request, I'm open there, and you can ping me anywhere. That would be great. 52:14

KevinThat would be really awesome to have. I always loved running the Besu client. It was, one of my favorite clients to run. 52:22

DiegoCool. Yeah, it's, I'm sure it's going to get there eventually. But, yeah, I have to find the right way that it's not too intrusive and too invasive for the reviewers there, and I want to find, like, the… the leanest path for re-adding this, which is… I mean, the plugin system of Besu is not prepared for, like, adding the type of consensus that we needed to add. So, that's, the thing that I have to propose as a change, and that's a deep change. That's… that's the thing. 53:03

IstoraSo is it the case that Besu is able to be syncing with ETC, but on a forked version, and the goal is to get that support into upstream? 53:14

DiegoYeah, what I… what I want is to… that we can have, like, the same… the same thing that we have with Nethermind, that we can support, like, provide support to the plugin, and everything that's necessary for running that plugin lives into the upstream. That's what I'm looking for. 53:35

IstoraRight. So this will dramatically simplify maintenance in the long run, and provide additional, diversity options. On that diversity option point, I just forgot to mention that there is this, new thing called triforce.classix.dev, which we'll be continually updating, which has got the, the four clients that Diego is currently maintaining, in various different regions. On a mesh network to basically help track the status of the network and ensure that everything's syncing correctly, and over time, we'll be adding additional insights, and basically creating, like, a public observability platform, to… to ensure that the state of the ETC network is healthy. So, it's currently live in a very basic state, but working, and you can check that out if you like. And eventually, Yeah, one of the things I probably should have mentioned earlier is the… Rivet RPC node service has recently gone offline, basically because the… I believe the contract is up or something, and they just didn't, renew that. So, if you are relying on Rivet, please check out, chainlist.org/61 for alternative RPC providers. And… In the not-too-distant future, you should be able to see something from Classix on there. I see we have, Dr… I'm gonna butcher the pronunciation of this. Okay, just left the channel. Okay, there was a guy called Dr. Something that left. But yes, we are coming up to the hour, and that's usually about how long these things last, so, I think now might be a good time to wrap things up, unless there's anything else, people would like to bring to the table. 55:43

lalOh, you haven't said enough about the Triforce. I visited the website, it's pretty awesome, and the visualization of it all, it's also cool. It's basically live right now. Right? 56:04

IstoraYep, yep, it's all real data. 56:08

lalQuite, quite interesting to, to have it, and I think it will, benefit, most members in the community, and also, entities who are providing, providing infrastructure, like miners, I think it's, it's a great tool to have. And, can't wait to see it, how, how it evolves. Underneath it, you, you did explain in a… in a blog post what's the… What's the infrastructure, underneath? And it's… it's pretty awesome, the way it was set up. And, hopefully, I don't know, maybe if you have the time to maybe explain it better. And we should, we should also, you know, promote that on the classic channels. 57:20

IstoraYeah, for sure. As a bit of background, this is kind of… it's tied into Diego's, client diversity push, which I think is really important, and basically 99% of the network is currently using core-geth. And… I wanted to ensure and promote the idea of mixing up clients by deploying a bunch of them on the same private network, but also connected to the rest of the network, so… To just briefly explain the tech stack, there is a… an operating system called NixOS, which allows for declarative configurations that define a machine. And on top of NixOS is a system called Clan, C-L-A-N. Which helps you configure basically a private VPN that can create a mesh network between these different nodes. and… With a single configuration, you can deploy an entire fleet. And basically, I've tried to create a… how to explain. Diverse. Maximalized deployment, where we use every different client in different regions with different hosts. In different sync modes. So we've got archive nodes, we've got Fast Sync, sorry, Snap Sync, and Full Sync. We've got the 4 clients, we've got every region, and I think there's, like, 5 different hosting providers. So it's gonna be really difficult to take this down fully. If it was forced to. And additionally, because they're talking to each other through a private mesh network. This helps with block propagation throughout the network, so if a region becomes isolated on the devp2p layer for some reason. maybe through public IP limiting from nations or regions, then because we're using a private VPN, those blocks can still propagate over WireGuard into those regions, and the local nodes that are connected to it will receive those blocks. So it kind of… It not just allows us to observe the network, but also helps the network be healthy. And… I want to use this as a kind of experimentation, petri dish. For getting insights into… How many different clients are connecting, how long block propagation takes, and… It's basically kind of like an upgraded version of this etcnodes.org eventually, so we'll list every single node that's been talked to through all of the different nodes that we're operating ourselves, and try to map the network that way. And then, eventually, like, because we're running archive nodes. create a public RPC service that provides, both… regular RPC, but also archival access, potentially through an API, so that people can run, like, deep research tasks and various other things you might want to do with an archive node. And it also tracks the mempool, which I believe is unique in ETC. I don't know if there's any other mempool trackers, but… I've designed this so that All the nodes that receive transactions that are not yet mined. We display on this, system. So… I think that's unique so far. 1:01:06

lalYeah, it's pretty, pretty awesome. One question that I have for you is related to… to alerts? Do you see, like. a way to, you know, write some alerts which are… which vary for, different thresholds, or, you know, do you see, like, a system where you could get notified about, about the chain overall, and who might use that information. 1:01:45

IstoraYeah, so… On the back end, we're using a database called ClickHouse. which is hooked up to an observability platform called HyperDX, which is a… a fairly… like, a modernized version of Grafana, basically. And that would allow us to create custom alerting. For basically anything. And we're tracking all of the metrics of the nodes, and… transactions, and basically anything we can, we just throw into this massive database, and currently we don't have any alerts set up yet, it's still under development, but this is, like, the first step of just having something public, and then building upon that, so… It will evolve over time. I don't think it's. 1:02:31

lalAre you able to do? Ideally, once this evolves, maybe it's… it's something we might want to have on the… new ethereumclassic.org website, you know, like a… like a feed. Would be interesting to… to just go there and, see the health… the health status. At all times. 1:03:03

IstoraYeah, I think on the new website, it'll be really awesome to show much more of a, like, activity of the network, as you say, and real-time transactions as they come through, maybe put the price back on, and… we had a discussion before about showing the history and everything, so… I'm really excited about the new website as it also evolves, and we get all these data sources. So, again, call out to anyone listening, if they have any ideas that they want to see on the new website, please let us know. 1:03:36

KevinYeah, adding on to that, I just wanna let anybody know, if you're building something on ETC, tell me about it. You know, I wanna amplify people who are, working on projects on the protocol. So if you have any ideas, or if you have skills, like in design, or writing, or video, or translation, or anything like that. and you can help with the rebrand, feel free to reach out, I'm on Twitter, @ClassicIsComing. I'm in both the Discords. My DMs are open, so, feel free to, contact me. 1:04:23

IstoraCool. Well, I think now's a good time to wrap the call, and I just want to say thank you everyone for joining. It's good to hear some old voices come back, and I'm really excited about where things are now. And I'm looking forward to working together with everyone as we, help write the next chapter of ETC. It's gonna be… fun, challenging, but I think super rewarding once, these things come to fruition, so… It's, a pleasure and privilege to be, to be with you guys. 1:04:55

KevinLikewise. 1:04:58

lalThank you for hosting. 1:05:00

DiegoYeah, thank you guys. 1:05:04

IstoraAlright, thanks everyone. I'll end the call now. Take care, bye-bye. 1:05:08

lalRight. 1:05:09

DiegoI… 1:05:10

KevinLater, guys.

Justice

Key Points Discussed

Introductions

Housekeeping

Agenda

ETC News

Kevin is Back!

Classix

@eth_classic and Twitter Together

Rebranding

Branding and Communications

Quantum

Follow-ups from Call 58

If There’s Time

AI Summary

Welcome and Introductions

Introducing Classix and ETC Grants DAO

Kevin Is Back

Marek on Proof of Work and Agentic Systems

The Rebrand with lal

core-geth Release and ETC News

Where Should core-geth Live?

Paying Gas in Stablecoins

Besu Support and Triforce

Action Items

Full Transcript