Cardano (ADA) founder Charles Hoskinson recently offered to help the troubled Ethereum Classic (ETC) community, but it came with a major condition. The community would first have to institute a decentralized treasury system, similar to Hoskinson’s Cardano and many other blockchain projects. If the community did not accept his terms, Hoskinson felt like his help would have been a waste of time and money:
“It's not worth my company's time or our strategies to pivot for a grant or a one off payment to go and bail us out. If there is a treasury system, it means that I can be in the business of building open source innovations and open source software and bringing these things to market and be paid to do that patent free and open source.”
Ethereum Classic recently suffered multiple 51% attacks, leaving the project’s fate uncertain. According to Hoskinson, his Cardano development company, IOHK, has done quite a bit of research in the proof-of-work space and may have a way to prevent similar attacks from occurring on the network in future.
IOHK has developed a hybrid proof-of-work, proof-of-stake protocol that also employs a periodic checkpoint system to prevent hostile network reorganizations. Hoskinson still has a 15-man team working on this project, but he is not willing to make any future commitments unless Ethereum Classic leadership accepts his terms.
Despite leaving the Ethereum project to work on Cardano, Hoskinson believes that it is still his moral obligation to help the project.
Yet Hoskinson lamented that despite him helping the Ethereum Classic community in the past, he has been treated unfairly by its leadership. Terry Culver, CEO of ETC Labs and ETC Core, released this statement to Cointelegraph in response to Hoskinson’s offer:
"As an open-source, decentralized community, we welcome all ideas and appreciate that so many people in the blockchain community have reached out to us. That said, we're not waiting for someone else to step in. We are a focused team who are passionate for ETC, and we will work diligently to ensure a bright future for ETC."
Apparently, the ETC community feels it has enough internal resources to deal with the difficult situation before them.