Ethereum Classic inches closer to Thanos upgrade

Many altcoin projects are turning a new leaf with hard forks like Bitcoin Cash [BCH] and Ethereum Classic [ETC]. While BCH hard fork is scheduled for 15 November, Ethereum Classic’s network upgrade dubbed Thanos will witness mainnet activation on 28th November at block 11,700,000.

Thanos ECIP-1099 will be a major network upgrade for ETC that is aimed at reducing the Directed Acyclic Graph [DAG] size for miners while calibrating the epoch length used in the DAG calculations. The new update from the ETC Cooperative has recommended all node operators to update their current client software. The node operators could choose from Hyperledger Besu v10.20.0 or Core Geth v1.11.7.

The Cooperative added an important warning for operated using OpenEthereum and Multi-Geth, to upgrade as the developers from the aforementioned services have “arbitrarily decided to remove support for Ethereum classic.” This will prevent the node operator to connect to the ETC network after the Thanos upgrade in almost two weeks.

Additionally, the Miners also have to upgrade their mining software to continue to mine the digital asset.

The ETC Cooperative completed the Mordor Testent activation at block 2,520,000 on 18 October.

Thanos ECIP-1099

The upgrade was earlier known as ECIP-1043 [DAG Limit Restriction] which took a new form of ECIP-1099 [Epoch Calibration]. The team explained:

“By doubling the Ethash epoch from 30K to 60K blocks, effectively reducing the DAG limit by half. Now 3GB-4GB GPUs can now continue mining ETC, and continue to attract miners to better secure the network.”

The need for Epoch calibration came from the aggressive original parameter which resulted in obsoleting support for GPUs still in use by the miners. By calibrating these parameters to reflect current hardware markets and mining ecosystem may bring the DAG growth in sync with commonly used GPUs, allowing the DAG system to continue to serve long into the future.