Ethereum Commonwealth report for 2018.

If you don’t want to read a lot of text skip to the “Progress of Ethereum Commonwealth” section.

Introduction

Ethereum Commonwealth is one of ETC development teams. It was founded in July 2017 and launched through ICO.

It was stated that we will focus on some projects only if we raise more than 20,000 ETC during the ICO.
This goal has not been achieved.

DEX ICO overview

Ethereum Commonwealth adheres to a policy of financial transparency. You can find the history of our ICO, financial operations, development funding and paid bounties in this open document. The document describes the transaction history, which can be easily verified in the ETC blockchain by transaction hashes.

We have live roadmap and you can check the history of our projects, development and finished goals here.

It is stated in our roadmap repo that the main goals of Ethereum Commonwealth are (1) Solve already-existing problems of Ethereum Classic and (2) Develop, improve and maintain Ethereum Classic network.

The following projects were named when I started the ICO:

1. Restore compatibility of GETH and GETH Classic.

2. PR Campaign.

3. Coding standard for smart-contracts (solidity).

4. Maintain developed projects.

5. Token exchange.

6. Protocol upgrades.

7. zk-SNARK.

8. Governance system.
9. ECNS
10. ERC223
11. DexNS

0. ClassicEtherWallet development. This was not planned during the ICO but CEW turns out to be the most important (development) tool in the whole ETC ecosystem. Thus, a large amount of resources was allocated specifically for the development of ClassicEtherWallet. As a smart-contract developer, I can say that there were many flaws in MEW and MyCrypto, which are currently resolved in CEW. Thus, I can say that ClassicEtherWallet is the most suitable development tool for ETC, ETH and every Ethereum-compatible network. You can find a full history of CEW development in this repo.

Here is a shortened list of the most important points:

• Added functionality of deploying contracts with constructor parameters. (Critical for contract developers)
• Fixed interchain balances issue.
• Implemented Message System at ClassicEtherWallet.
• Implemented wallet encryption functionality that allows to re-encrypt any exported private key into a key-store file format. (Important security feature)
• Implemented contract deploying with ClassicMask/MetaMask.
• Fixed 2 issues of DexNS name registering.
• Changed gasPrice evaluation mechanic to prevent user mistakes.
• Implemented gasPrice evaluation.
• Array type support for contract calls. (Critical for contract developers)
• Implemented automated search of known contract addresses for automated ABI loading.
• Added more networks to ClassicEtherWallet.
• Added more nodes.
• Implemented “background node” functionality (Critical for interchain services)
• Lots of bugfixes could be found here: https://github.com/EthereumCommonwealth/etherwallet/pulls?page=2&q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed 3

Ethereum Commonwealth is also running some high-bandwidth ETC nodes.

1. We worked on restoring compatibility of GETH and GETH Classic for quite a while, however we did not achieved any significant progress in this area. At some point, GETH Classic Commonwealth-edition was suspended. Then MultiGeth was developed.
2. PR and marketing were delegated to other teams and ETC community. At the beginning of the ICO, the situation in the community was not clear, however, when the ICO came to an end, many things changed. Therefore, it was decided to delegate this into the hands of professional marketers and not to hire our own marketer since our funding was limited and we clearly understood this from the very beginning.
3. Significant research was made and I came to a conclusion that a new solidity coding standard can not ensure a significant security improvement for smart-contract development area. This point of our initial roadmap was deprecated and withdrawn.
   An alternative mechanism to improve the security of smart-contracts was developed — the structure of Free-Of-Charge Security Audits performed by professional auditing team (Security DAO).
   This requires consensus changes (hardfork) to implement the Security DAO at ETC.
4. Ethereum Commonwealth is maintaining its projects successfully.
5. Unlike Ethereum in the ETC there was not so much ICOs and not much tokens. As the result, developing a new decentralized exchange for non-existing tokens was not the highest priority goal. Our funds were limited and we decided to suspend decentralized exchange development.
6. We did not raise enough funds to implement WebAssembly VM and zk-Snarks as we stated earlier.
   We have developed other protocol changes, but the process of agreeing on making changes to ETC is very time consuming. Therefore, we decided to launch another chain for the implementation of experimental solutions and propose only tested/developed solutions with working implementation.
7. We did not raise enough funds to implement zk-Snarks. Currently, we are running a bounty for a privacy protocol implementation proposal.
8. Governance system is scheduled for Q4 2019. This requires consensus changes (hardfork).
9. ECNS is deployed and finished.
10. ERC223 is finished.
11. DexNS is finished.
12. [additional project] Message system is developed and finished.
13. [additional project] Viper online compiler was deployed. Finished.

At some point, it became obvious that we can’t just go longer with only ETC chain. We need an experimental chain with value. That’s why Callisto Chain came to existence.

At March 5th, 2018 we handled the Callisto Airdrop for all ETC holders to accomplish the above stated points/ create a neutral research environment/ develop and test experimental protocol changes. Unfortunately, this was misunderstood by some community members and other development teams (this post for example). I hope that now that we are ready to offer ready-to-implement solutions to existing problems of ETC, no one will doubt that the Callisto project is founded with the goal of strengthening and improving the ETC chain. This project certainly has its own value, but this does not interfere, but rather contributes to the goal of researching future improvements.

At Oct 13, 2018 the main account of Ethereum Commonwealth runs out of funds. Since then, we have stopped active development and only maintained our most important ETC resources/projects (for example CEW, viper compiler, high bandwidth RPC nodes). We focused on test protocol implementations, research of possible solutions for the actual problems of Ethereum Classic. Dexaran and Yograterol were no longer paid with ETC. However, our development expenses were paid with Callisto Treasury.

Progress of Ethereum Commonwealth

Summarizing the above points, I can conclude that the main problems of Ethereum Classic project are:

1. Lack of development funding. (This is even more obvious now, as we have a precedent of ETCDEV team being shut down due to lack of funds)
2. Financial transparency.
3. Deprecation of the ecosystem.
4. Governance system.
5. Protocol changes are difficult to develop/propose/agree to implement. (this is normal for decentralized community and large projects)

All these problems for us are known and Ethereum Commonwealth is prepared to handle them.

We founded a sub-project called Callisto Network. Callisto Network is a separate chain which is intended to be an experimental project for the implementation of ETC-related protocol changes. Callisto Network is the solution for multiple problems of Ethereum Classic. Here are some improvements that we can now “copy&paste” into ETC: (1) Free-Of-Charge Security Auditing system, (2) Cold Staking — the financial mechanism to push the price higher and stop dumping during the bearish market cycle, (3) Permanent Source of Funding for developers and marketing teams.

First of all, we are ready to fund the Ethereum Commonwealth with the Callisto Treasury, and we will not be bankrupted so easily. Check our official position about the funding of ETC projects here.

We have the solution for Lack of development funding and Financial transparency issues of Ethereum Classic. We have a working implementation of Treasury and we are ready to provide the implementation for ETC as soon as the community will come to the agreement about this. We can definitely solve this right now.

In Callisto, we implemented many of the solutions that we are now ready to provide for ETC. We have source codes, we have WORKING implementation, we have a living proof that the system is viable.

Callisto Network has a working Security Auditing Department. Read more here. Callisto Security department already audited some of ETC projects.

Unfortunately, the demand on ETC contracts security audits is not that high.

Ethereum Commonwealth has some funds reserved for further ETC development. However, we will not conduct active development during the bearish market cycle. We will focus on proposing the solutions of the main ETC problems during the next year because we have working/researched/tested implementations. Ethereum Commonwealth maintains it’s “finished” projects and ETC ecosystem. We are ready to provide any critical tools to prevent the deprecation of ETC chain.

We will research and implement the solution for Governance system next.

Conclusion

Ethereum Commonwealth has solutions for the following problems of ETC ecosystem:

1. Lack of permanent source of development funding.
2. Financial Transparency. Both Ethereum Commonwealth and Callisto Network are absolutely transparent with our funding/money distribution.
3. Bearish market cycle inevitably leads to a fall of price. Cold Staking can reduce this effect significantly.

In 2019 we plan to push the implementation of these proposals in ETC and the development of solutions to other important problems.