What Happened with the Ethereum Fork and Who is Behind Ethereum Classic?
Understanding the Ethereum fork requires understanding the fundamental philosophies that Ethereum began with.
One philosophy was a “Code is Law” philosophy and the other philosophy was a “World Computer” philosophy.
Originally, these goals were intertwined and there were no issues but then the DAO fork happened.
This created a split in the Ethereum community where the chains went in different directions. At this point, it became necessary for someone to step in and make sure that Ethereum Classic didn’t wither and die as an ecosystem.
This knight in shining armor was IOHK.
However, deciding to get involved required IOHK to not only manage the community but also to build a client and build a roadmap for a vision of where Ethereum Classic could go.
Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano comments on Ethereum Classic, “It’s very easy when you start a project, where the project has a strong core group of developers - like the case of Dash or Ethereum with Vitalik - that you can just kind of rule by beneficent dictator…. But if you look at ecosystems like Bitcoin or Ethereum Classic, these ecosystems actually do not have a leader - there’s no one person you can point to ”
IOHK, which is also the engineering firm behind the development of Cardano, gains doubly from their involvement in Ethereum Classic. First, they get to closely research the way that a decentralized governance system works. Second, when they eventually turn the Cardano’s governance system into a decentralized model, they will already have anticipated many of the problems that it will have by studying Ethereum Classic.
So Ethereum Classic will actually give IOHK the crystal ball they need to be able to look into their own future and essentially have a guinea pig that they can test on before any concepts get enshrined into Cardano’s protocol.
“So to [IOHK] as a company it’s really good for us from a pedagogical sense, an educational sense, for us to work in an environment like that. Where there’s checks and balances and we’re not in complete control - or in some cases any control. So if we’re gonna make proposals to update and evolve the protocol, we have to learn how to do that in a decentralized ecosystem. That gives us a vision of where Cardano and other projects like it are gonna go in the coming years. ”
A perfect example of this is Cardano’s new treasury proposal. A tremendous amount of time and effort went into building it and eventually it will make its way into an Ethereum Classic improval proposal.
Surely, not everyone in the Ethereum Classic community will embrace this new treasury with open arms, forcing Cardano to learn how influence the Ethereum Classic community to understand that it is in their best interest rather than forcing the community to change like a serf under the Russian tsars.
Cardano again has found a way to turn what at first seems like a mark against them into a source of inspiration, knowledge and power.