The Ethereum Community Is No Longer Fighting With Itself

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This post is part of CoinDesk’s 2019 Year in Review, a collection of 100 op-eds, interviews and takes on the state of blockchain and the world.Bob Summerwill is Executive Director of the Ethereum Classic Cooperative, a volunteer for the Ethereum Project and Community Ambassador for CryptoChicks. 2016 and 2017 were divisive years for the ethereum…

imageThis post is part of CoinDesk’s 2019 Year in Review, a collection of 100 op-eds, interviews and takes on the state of blockchain and the world.Bob Summerwill is Executive Director of the Ethereum Classic Cooperative, a volunteer for the Ethereum Project and Community Ambassador for CryptoChicks.
2016 and 2017 were divisive years for the ethereum ecosystem.It would have been easy for onlookers to think “Look at all of this in-fighting and drama.The next web? The next revolution? I do not think so.Ethereum is going nowhere!”
They would have been dead-wrong in that assessment, as 2019 has demonstrated.
Related: Amir Taaki’s Ongoing Crypto Revolution
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.This continues to the present day with its controversial proposal to move the Parity-Ethereum project into a DAO.
In July 2016, we had world class drama when The DAO was drained of funds.After a month of the most intense debate, the ecosystem was cleaved into two with The DAO Fork.

The “World Computer” majority accepted the fork which returned funds.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.
In October 2016, Parity Technologies blocked relicensing of cpp-ethereum to Apache 2.0 at the eleventh hour because it would have affected their commercial interests.They also feared that having IBM’s “nose under the tent” could have led to a chain split.That relicensing looked very likely to result in a huge swing towards ethereum within the Hyperledger consortium, which had been formed a little under a year before.

Not to be.
Blocking the relicensing led indirectly to the creation of the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance (EEA), which emerged as a “Plan B” as the relicensing floundered.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.
Related: Looking Backward to Build the Future: How Academia Is Shifting Its Blockchain Focus
So, February 2017 saw the founding of the EEA, including household names like Microsoft, Intel, JPMorgan, BNY Mellon and CME Group.The members were focused primarily on private and consortium chain scenarios.

The birth of the EEA was a very tense affair, with serious worries that the Ethereum Foundation (EF) would flat out denounce the EEA.

Vitalik Buterin was privately supportive, but did not attend the launch event in person.Instead, he sent in a pre-recorded video that made no mention of the EEA but spoke in generalities about business uses of ethereum.The EF itself made no formal statement.The tension was palpable in those early months.
Was the EEA an attempt at corporate capture of ethereum? Was the EEA just a front for ConsenSys (which was contributing most of the resources during that launch period and early stages of operation)? Parity was also notably absent, and indeed have never joined the EEA.

Were the EEA and Hyperledger rivals? Was this just a proxy battle between Microsoft (a major backer of ethereum) and IBM (the prime mover within Hyperledger?)
The artificial boundary we have put in place in our minds between ‘public chains’ and ‘private chains’ is fading rapidly.
None of these fears were true.

They were all the result of zero-sum thinking.
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.An analogy could be drawn with the internet and intranets.Both have their uses.Deployment choices would just be configuration settings on common codebases.
That is just how things have played out.
That process started in February 2017, when Monax (a founding EEA member) contributed the first Ethereum Virtual Machine – Burrow (previously known as ErisDB) to Hyperledger – the first concrete step towards ethereum technology within Hyperledger.Burrow was integrated into Hyperledger Sawtooth (as Seth), and then into Hyperledger Fabric.EVM-in-Fabric was the primary display at the IBM booth at Consensus in May 2018..

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