Ethereum Foundation Donates $134k to Ethereum Classic Co-op Amid Thawing Tensions

The Ethereum Foundation has donated 15,000 Ethereum Classic (ETC) tokens – or about $134,000 as of press time – to the Ethereum Classic Cooperative, after coming across the bounty in “old Foundation wallets,” according to a Foundation Medium post.

The Ethereum Foundation and Ethereum Classic Cooperative are largely similar organizations, both being semi-autonomous support vehicles for their respective chains, providing financial backing and fostering community engagement and growth. The Ethereum Foundation, for example, is currently hosting Devcon4 in Prague.

The Ethereum (ETH) and ETC development communities have been cooperating as of late on some technical challenges shared by the two chains, explained the Foundation’s Virgil Griffith. The donation seems to come as a sort of peace offering for “thawing tensions” in Griffith’s words. The two chains famously split more than two years ago amid the controversy of the DAO refund (full background here).

No obligation to ETH Foundation/ETC Co-op

Igor Artamonov who is lead developer at ETCDEV, a principal ETC development group, almost immediately took to twitter to clarify the nature of the donation, stating that ETCDEV is independent from both the ETC network and the Cooperative, and “is not funded in any way” by the latter; that it is not collaborating with the Foundation; and that ETCDEV is under no obligation to collaborate with either the Foundation or the Cooperative as a result of the disbursement.

All of these statements are consonant with the spirit of ETC, whose genesis as a result of the DAO hack emphasizes a decidedly laissez-faire approach to official oversight and control; as put by the mission statement of ETC’s Github page, “the classic version [preserves] untampered history; free from external interference and subjective tampering of transactions.”

Ethereum’s Devcon4 bore fruit this week, as the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance released an updated version of its standardized specifications, which are aimed at streamlining integrations of ETH into a host of downstream applications.