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Ethereum Classic has undergone a hard fork that inaugurates a new update aimed at increasing the participation of miners and increasing security.
According to Blockscout’s ETC explorer, around 3:45 UTC on Sunday, ETC’s mainnet reached a block height of 11,700,000, automatically triggering Thanos’ early upgrade.
Terry Culver, CEO of ETCLabs, told CoinDesk Thanos it’s an “important milestone” as the network moves to improve support for existing miners and attract new ones.
Specifically, the Thanos protocol update (ECIP-1099) will bring the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) file size well below 4GB, which means the 3GB and 4GB graphics processing units (GPUs) GB can once again undermine the network.
It also doubled the length of the ETC mining period, or epoch, from 30,000 to 60,000 blocks, slowing the increase in size of the DAG (which grows with each epoch). With the rollout, 4GB GPUs will remain supported for another three years, according to a blog post from ETC.
The update will allow miners with 3GB and 4GB GPU systems to resume mining at ETC, “ultimately increasing network security and promoting a more distributed and healthier mining ecosystem,” Culver said.
Prior to the update, the DAG size was already very close to 4GB, forcing some older GPU mining cards off the network. Thanos’ update effectively reduced the DAG size from 3.94GB to 2.47GB, according to the post.
According to Culver, over 90% of the existing miners have migrated to the Thanos crossroads. In addition, with the arrival of new miners online, the hashrate of the network has also increased significantly.
ETC has seen a series of so-called 51% attacks and has tried to implement measures to make the network more resilient. One such initiative called MESS (for the modified exponential subjective score) is said to make blockchain “reorganizations” much more expensive to perform (although its effectiveness has been questioned).
“MESS was the first step, protecting the network, miners and exchanges,” Culver said.
As more miners are vital to building a robust blockchain network, Culver said the next phase of security measures has been successfully completed. “Thanos expands and strengthens the mining ecosystem,” he said.
