The Ethereum Community Is No Longer Fighting With Itself

Bob Summerwill is Executive Director of the Ethereum Classic Cooperative, a volunteer for the Ethereum Project and Community Ambassador for CryptoChicks.

In January 2016, the former CTO of the ethereum project, Gavin Wood, spun off the former ETHDEV C++ team to found Ethcore - later renamed as Parity Technologies.

There has been an ongoing love-hate relationship between Parity and the rest of the Ethereum community ever since.

That fork retained the ETH "Ticker" and the ethereum trademark while the "Code is Law" crew showed the world that minority chains can survive by supporting the un-forked chain and bringing Ethereum Classic to life.

No grand alliance between Ethereum and Hyperledger was possible at that stage, but there were sufficient enterprises using ethereum for more formal collaboration to be worthwhile.

The birth of the EEA was a very tense affair, with serious worries that the Ethereum Foundation would flat out denounce the EEA. Vitalik Buterin was privately supportive, but did not attend the launch event in person.

As Jeremy Miller said at the EEA Launch event, there was no reason why a suitably modular ethereum codebase should not meet all of these use-cases - public and private, permissioned or permissionless.

That process started in February 2017, when Monax contributed the first Ethereum Virtual Machine - Burrow to Hyperledger - the first concrete step towards ethereum technology within Hyperledger.

EVM-in-Fabric was the primary display at the IBM booth at Consensus in May 2018.In January 2018, I wrote a tweetstorm that became the "Call for an End To Tribalism in Ethereum" keynote at the Ethereum Community Conference in Paris in March 2018.

Now we just need IBM to join the EEA!Tensions between the Ethereum Foundation and the EEA thawed in 2019, with Aya Miyaguchi, the Executive Director of the EF joining the Board of the EEA in August 2019, and the Mainnet Initiative being announced as a collaboration between the EF and the EEA.In August 2019, ConsenSys announced that it would be joining Hyperledger as a premier member, with founder Joe Lubin joining the governing board.