Tag: Forkonomy

Forkonomy is a project studying the entropy-driven fragmentations of cryptocurrency codebases and ledgers, with the aim of gaining insight into the possible futures of major networks by analogy with astronomy.

Towards an “Ontological Meta-Stack”: who wants a Subjectivity Sandwich?

Taking the layered systems approach to its supra-logical endpoint. Chains of blocks ALL the way down.

I’ve been invoking a layered stack model (after OSI and Buterin) to attempt finer grain characterisations, explanations and rationalisations of various epistemic and phenomenological happenings in the domain of cryptocurrencies and blockchain-architected P2P networks for a while. It’s a helpful lens with which to attempt definitions of many of the most loosely employed terms in regular use — decentralisation, permissionlessness, censorship-resistance, immutability. Take a look at Reaching Everyone Pt II for the low-down.

By Kevin Durkin for In The Mesh
Excerpt from TokenSpace cryptographic asset taxonomy research manuscript.

The reason for the above framing is that the acid test of a conceptual framework’s robustness when harnessed to build classification systems such as taxonomies and typologies is its ability to accept new objects or be generalisable into a meta-metholodology. To this end, one can also readily frame the ontological quest (simply put, the pursuit of wisdom and meaning) as a layered stack of intellectual discliplines. I’m sure this notion of an ontological meta-stack isn’t a totally original approach, but having played with it for a while it’s become a useful conceptual lens with which to (try to) understand how trans/multi/inter/anti/pan/omni/supra/quasi/para/post disciplinary research (choose your favoured poison) differs from steady state scholarly work. Furthermore, layered stacks may be one of the most easily invoked mechanism to achieve differential discretisation whilst grappling with linear domains. Apropos of nothing: a few years ago I was completely preoccupied with the wacky idea of starting a serious-and-satirical research disorganisation-superimposition that I was very tongue-in-cheekily calling The Institute of Non-Linear Phenomenlogy. Stacks of layers need not apply within.

Overly individuated, siloed or specialised knowledge domains — typically mature fields — tend to be hyper-focused on very small regions of the spectrum rather like the spectroscopic disciplines which I spent a decade playing supramolecular detective with. A photophysicist / spectroscopist could spend an entire lifetime “playing with” a narrowly bounded set of quantised energy levels in an atom, molecule, crystal or superstructure.

The electromagnetic spectrum, much more than meets the eye — or at least that the eye can detect & process. Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/EM_spectrumrevised.png

Likewise, a researcher could spend a fruitful and fulfilling career looking for the same signatures in wildy different systems. I studied the same ?(CO) vibrational signature in both exotic low-temperature astrophysical ices and in complex solution-based supramolecular assemblies. The same fingerprint can be exploited to provide rich information with respect to its environment on both sub-nanosecond and celestial timescales!

Vibrational spectroscopy applied to astrophysically relevant ices. Conducted at Leiden Observatory, 2003.
Time-resolved IR spectroscopy of Re(I) complexes & their transient excited states on the picosecond timescale. Conducted at the University of Nottingham & Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, 2003–6.

It would be remiss to attempt an approach to this weighty subject without discussing taxonomy, epistemology and more generally the design science of information systems. Taxonomy is one of the more powerful intellectual tools at our disposal with which to progress towards ontologies — although a classification system may not have truth value in itself, it may be an intermediate development and therefore useful in its own right.

Excerpt from TokenSpace cryptographic asset taxonomy research manuscript.

Let’s not get too deep into the weeds here, instead take a look at various TokenSpace materials to go deeper: Primer, Q&A, Compressed Essay as Analytical Index, Manuscript (available on request), Lecture video (soon!).

Excerpt from TokenSpace cryptographic asset taxonomy research manuscript.

Tegmark’s notion of subjectivity at the Universe’s margins (Planck limits, complex adaptive systems) with empirical objectivist domains betwixt seems appropos here. Let’s call it a subjectivity sandwich. Feynman famously opined “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, but there ostensibly exists even more room at the top!

Okay so here it is, the first iteration anyway. Let me know what you think by commenting or pinging me on Twitter. In reality, this framework may not be truly linear, granular and hierarchical but there is hopefully some value to it. Perhaps the next iteration of this half-baked idea will be an open form: woven meshes, interlinked gears — an ontological meta-DAG!?!?

As we move from bottom to top, complexity of the agents in focus increase alongside subjectivity. But at sub-quantum scales, the Universe also appears subjective — at least based on observations through our current paradigmatic lenses. Interesting phenomena tend to emerge at the margins, between disciplines or even as a synthesis of several elements of the meta-stack. Perhaps it’s time to repurpose the wonderful bibliotechnical term marginalia to capture this essence.

Cryptocurrencies are a great example of systems drawing on a number of these components. Indeed at the network level these protocols are very simple messaging systems but can exhibit extremely complex and unexpected emergent phenomena — Forkonomy is a good example of an attempt to apply unusual lenses to characterise unusual goings-on. This may also help to explain why researchers possessing deep subject-specific knowlege pertaining to one of the areas which cryptocurrency draws upon — cryptography, distributed systems, protocol engineering, law, economics, complex systems — often find it difficult to communicate with fellow scholars rooted in another traditional pastime. Perhaps the rise of novel meta-disciplines such as complexity science show that one approach — in our parlance — to harness and further understand non-linear domains is to capture as much of the stack as possible.

An Ontological Meta-DAG? “Civilisation Tech Tree” (Sid Meier, Firaxis Games)

TLDR: Are we entering a new “Age of Techno-Dilettantism”?

What the ForkGov! Does staying together tear you apart even more?

Fork-governance of cryptocurrencies and decentralised networks examined

[Note: This text written in January 2019 follows on from “Towards an Analytical Discipline of Forkonomy” and “Forkonomy Revisited” and was first included in the Decentralised Thriving Anthology]

First, some definitions.

Forks:

In open source software, project codebase forks are commonplace and occur when existing software development paths diverge, creating separate and distinct pieces of software. Torvalds’ original Linux kernel from 1991 has been forked into countless descendant projects. In the case of blockchain-based cryptocurrency networks implementing ledgers, there exists the prospect of both codebase and ledger forks. A cryptocurrency codebaseforkcreates an independent project to be launched with a new genesis block which may share consensus rules but with an entirely different transaction history than its progenitor — e.g. BTC and LTC. A ledger fork creates a separate incompatible network, sharing its history with the progenitor network until the divergent event, commonly referred to as a chain split — e.g. BTC and BCH.

Consensus rule changes or alteration of the network transaction history may be the cause of such a fracture, deliberate or unplanned. Often when networks upgrade software, consensus rules or implement new features a portion of the network participants may be left behind on a vestigial timeline that lacks developer, community, wallet or exchange support. In the summer of 2018 a fifth of nodes running Bitcoin Cash (BCH) — a minority ledger fork of BTC with significantly relaxed block size limitations — were separated from the BCH network and a non-trivial number of would-be nodes remained disconnected from the BCH network weeks later.

Governance: Decision making process between multiple parties.

Blockchain governance: Decision-making process by mutually distrusting entities in a multi-party distributed system.

On/off-chain governance (aka governance by / of the network): Decisions are made either explicitly through the network’s ledger and UTXOs/balances possessed therein, or via some other (in)formal mechanism such as rough or social consensus.

Read these articles collated by CleanApp for a detailed discussion of key considerations in formally governed blockchain networks.

Immutability: An attribute primarily observed at the protocol layer in the decentralised networking stack — upon which the monetary layer depends for persistence — ensuring the inability of stakeholders or adversaries to alter the transaction record and thereby balances. With this in mind, the oft-quoted concept of ‘code is law’ which refers to immutability in cryptocurrency networks, typically referring more to preserving the intended use and function of a system and its ledger rather than a blind adherence to a software implementation regardless of flaws or vulnerabilities.

By Kevin Durkin for In The Mesh. Source: https://inthemesh.com/archive/reaching-everyone-pt-ii/

What Maketh a Fork?

The distinction between what constitutes a vestigial network and a viable breakaway faction is unclear and difficult to objectively parameterise. There is a significant element of adversarial strategy, political gamesmanship and public signalling of (real or synthetic) intent and support via social media platforms. The notions of critical mass and stakeholder buy-in are ostensibly at play since ecosystem fragmentations would be characterised as strongly negative sum through the invocation of Metcalfe’s Law as regards network effects and hence value proposition. Any blockchain secured thermodynamically by Proof-of-Work (PoW) is susceptible to attack vectors such as so-called 51 % or majority attacks, leading to re-orgs (chain re-organisations) as multiple candidates satisfying chain selection rules emerge. These can result in the potential for double-spending the same funds more than once against entities such as exchanges who do not require sufficient confirmations for transaction finality to be reliable in an adversarial context. Should a network fragment into multiple disconnected populations, adversaries with control of much less significant computational resource would be in reach of majority hashrate either using permanent or rented computation from sources such as Nicehash or Amazon EC3.

A striking example of this was the divergence of the Ethereum developer and leadership cadre (ETH) from the canonical account-oriented Ethereum blockchain (ETC) due to the exploitation of a flawed smart contract project resembling a quasi-securitised decentralised investment fund known as The DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation). In this case the Ethereum insiders decided to sacrifice immutability and by extension censorship-resistance in order to conduct an effective bailout of DAO participants which came to exercise Too-Big-To-Fail influence over the overall Ethereum network, insider asset holdings, token supply and mindshare. A social media consultation process in conjunction with on-chain voting was employed to arrive at this conclusion though both methods are known to be flawed and gameable. During the irregular state transition process akin to a rollback, a co-ordinated effort between miners, exchanges and developers took place on private channels, exposing the degree of centralisation inherent in the power structures of constituent network participants.

The key event which transformed the canonical Ethereum blockchain (where the DAO attacker kept their spoils) from a vestigial wiped out chain to a viable if contentious minority fork was the decision by Bitsquare and Poloniex exchanges to list the attacker’s timeline as Ethereum Classic (ETC) alongside high-profile mining participants such as Chandler Guo, well resourced financial organisations such as Grayscale Invest (a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group) and former development team members such as Charles Hoskinson to publically declare and deploy support, developers and significant hashrate to defend the original Ethereum network. ETC now exists as an independent and sovereign network with diverging priorities, characteristics and goals to the larger Ethereum network ETH.

Forks and network governance: the case of Bitcoin and SegWit (excerpt from Forkonomy paper)

For a range of reasons, there is often strident resistance to hard forks — irreversible protocol upgrades or relaxing of the existing consensus ruleset — in “ungoverned” trust-minimised cryptocurrency networks such as BTC. The lack of controlling entities may lead to a chain split and lasting network partition if the delicate balance of stakeholder incentives fails in the presence of a divergent event. The implementation of SegWit (Segregated Witness) by the BTC network was eventually achieved in 2017 as a backward-compatible soft fork following several years of intense political and strategic maneuvering by the constituent stakeholders in the BTC network. This off-chain governance process of emergent consensus requiring supermajority or unanimity measured by miner signalling has proven to be an inefficient and gameable mechanism for administering the BTC network. Certain stakeholder constituencies such as the developers maintaining the reference Bitcoin Core software client implementation of BTC could not easily reach agreement with mining oligopolists and so-called big block advocates over the optimum technological trajectory for the BTC network.

Major stakeholders of the mining constituency strongly opposed SegWit as it would render a previously clandestine proprietary efficiency advantage known as covert ASICBoost ineffective on the canonical BTC chain. A grassroots BTC community movement campaigning for a User Activated Soft Fork (UASF) for SegWit implementation and a face-saving Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP91) facilitated the eventual lock-in of the SegWit upgrade in the summer of 2017. A contentious network partition took place in August 2017, giving rise to the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network which rejected SegWit and opted instead for linear on-chain scaling. By changing the block size and loosening the consensus ruleset without overwhelming agreement from all constituencies of the BTC network, it is difficult to find a basis for BCH proponents’ claims to be the canonical Bitcoin blockchain without invoking appeals to emotion, authority or other logical fallacies. The continuing presence of Craig S. Wright and his claims to be a progenitor of Bitcoin are an example of these attempts at legitimacy.

What the #forkgov? Fork-resistance and governance

Given the significant downside potential of real and perceived threats to the resilience and legitimacy of a fragmenting network and loss of associated network effects, the ability of a blockchain-based protocol network to demonstrate fork resistance provides significant strength to its value proposition and two notable examples of networks attempting to utilise such a mechanism are Tezos and Decred. Decred is an example of a hybrid PoW/PoS monetary network which is implementing a proposal and governance mechanism termed Politeia. Since coin-holders have voting rights based on stake weight, they have the ability to keep miners and developer constituencies honest through the mechanism to reach decisions by majority stakeholder consensus on matters including hard forks. These lessons were ostensibly learned through the developer team’s experiences in writing a BTC client which they felt was not appraised objectively by the Bitcoin Core developer ecosystem. Decred’s fork resistance is effectively achieved by the fact that most stakeholders would be non-voting on a minority chain, it would remain stalled as blocks would not be created or propagated across the upstart network.

Taking a high-level perspective, let’s address the most general question: are these two notions meaningfully compatible? If we think of any natural process in the Universe — from the celestial to the tribal — as accretions and communities grow in size and complexity, scalability challenges increase markedly. Minimising accidental chain splits during protocol upgrades is a worthy goal. However, denying a mechanism to allow factions a graceful and orderly exit has upsides in preserving the moat of network effect but at the cost of internal dissonance, which may grow over time and lead to second-order shenanigans. Sound familiar?

One can look at ledger forks in a few different ways as good, bad or neutral:

[Good] A/B/…/Z testing of different technical, economic or philosophical approaches aka “Let the market decide, fork freedom baby!”

[Bad] Deleterious to network effects of nascent currency protocols with respect to Metcalfe or (IMO much more relevant) transactome-informed network capital theory as discussed by Gogerty.

[Neutral] An inevitability of entropy and/or finite social scalability as these networks grow and mature it is not realistic to keep all stakeholders sufficiently aligned for optimal network health.

As such, protocol layer fork resistance and effective public fora with voting mechanisms can certainly be helpful tools, but there is a question as to whether democracy (the tyranny of the majority) should be exercised in all cases. If there was a “block size” style civil war in Tezos or Decred with no acceptable compromise in sight, would the status quo still be the best situation in all cases?

My perspective is that fork-resistance will largely redistribute the manifestations of discontent rather than provide a lasting cure to ills, and the native network governance mechanisms may be gamed by either incumbents or ousters. More time is needed to see how decision-making regarding technical evolution unfolds in both networks. Decred seems to be sitting pretty with a fairly attack-resilient hybrid PoW/PoS system, but there are some “exclusionary forces” in the network leading to the escalating DCR-denominated costs of staking tickets necessary to receive PoS rewards and participate in proposal voting, denying access to the mechanism to smaller holders.

Demand for tickets and staking rewards naturally increases with ongoing issuance, as the widening pool of coin holders wanting to mitigate dilution also does. As the ticket price is dynamic and demand-responsive, it creates upwards pressure which would make tickets inaccessible for a growing proportion of coin holders. At time of writing, “ticket splitting” allowing smaller holders to engage in PoS is available from some stake pools and self-organised collectives but the process is not yet automated in reference clients. On the other hand, the ongoing bear market has seen the USD ticket price fall from ~$8–10k USD at January and May 2018 peaks to ~$2k USD today in late January 2019 so those entering Decred with capital from outside the cryptocurrency domain would likely be undeterred. Data from dcrdata.org and coincap.io.

50 day moving average of DCR staking ticket prices. Source: https://explorer.dcrdata.org/charts#ticket-price

Further, as per Parallel Industries’ TokenSpace taxonomy research, staking rewards resemble dividends and token-based governance privileges resemble shareholder rights which make Decred appear a little closer to the traditional definition of a capital asset than pure PoW systems. This may or may not be an issue depending how regulation unfolds. Tezos has those potential issues plus the regulatory risk from the token sale. Decred’s airdrop may not have distributed the coin as fairly as possible but will undoubtedly attract a lower compliance burden than a token sale or premine.

“Activist Forks” & “Unfounder Forks”

Can you appreciate the technology utility but dislike the economic, human and compliance issues packaged together with a project?

Taking this a step further, these dissonant groups may conduct a guerilla campaign inside a network to focus attention on their cause. Last summer, a few anti-KYC factions of Tezos had appeared on social media outlets prior to network launch, however since the mainnet launch things have quietened down somewhat. One faction which still apparently intends to create a fork of Tezos changed tact and became a delegated staker within the network whilst continuing to voice dissent — perhaps this “fork activism” can be interpreted as a response to the “fork-resistance” of Tezos.

So, what else could a fork activist do? Take a look around at the ongoing ICO bonfire of the vanities which is largely due to poorly thought out sales of high-friction futility tokens infringing upon / attempting to circumvent various regulations around the world. The prospect of removing the token issuers and the tokens themselves once treasuries are liquidated (by themselves, or by lawmakers) and development ceases is quite attractive indeed — will we see a wave of “unfounder forks” as in this example? Perhaps operating in reverse to Simon de la Rouviere’s “Tokenised Forking” where both tokens and founders are excised.

Ethereum Classic: The Ungoverned Blockchain?

How does anything get done if there are no leaders? Why hasn’t ETC died by being abandoned by the Ethereum Foundation after TheDAO hard fork? The ecosystem of participants and stakeholders working in and around the ETC network is examined in outline below.

So, where and how does ETC “governance” happen?

Making changes to Ethereum Classic consensus rules is “ungoverned” in a similar way to Bitcoin and Ethereum with little appetite for large numbers of consensus-breaking upgrades. Currently it is an ad hoc process where ECIP proposals are raised on Github, discussed in public/semi-public fora and should they be widely supported without contention locked-in to the nominally canonical “Classic-Geth” client with the other clients (Parity Labs’ eponymous software and IOHK’s Mantis) merging in response. In the case of a contentious proposed upgrade some arbitrary signalling criteria could potentially be set (i.e. % of miners upgrade/signal, on-chain carbon vote as used by ETH to justify DAO hard fork) though this has not occurred in ETC since the events which led to the creation of the network.

Source: https://medium.com/@TokenHash/the-star-improvement-proposal-standard-for-ethereum-classics-ecip-process-df20453de8e6
On-chain “Carbon Vote” for TheDAO fork on Ethereum. Source: https://elaineou.com/2016/07/18/stick-a-fork-in-ethereum/

As with other networks based on the original Ethereum design, some parameters such as adjustments to the gas limit per block — restricting the amount of EVM computation in a similar way to block size / weight in Bitcoin-derived networks — can be enacted in small increments on a per block basis via miner signalling. There is currently some discussion to motivate a decrease in the gas limit per block in order to avoid the chain growth rate issues which make running ETH full nodes a challenge in terms of burdensome resouce requirements. The likely aggregation of ETC hashrate among a small number of big mining farms, cooperatives and pools presents issues with reliance on miner signalling, as recently evidenced in Bitcoin when the merge-mined EVM Rootstock sidechains went live with 80% of network hashrate signalling. The naive downstream adoption of “default” Ethereum settings such as ETH’s 8 million gas limit per block is also a potential issue for ETC’s ungovernance to navigate.

ETC Gas Limit versus Block Height. Source: http://etcsummit.pllel.com

Two hard fork network upgrades have taken place in the ETC network — ECIP-1010 to remove the “difficulty bomb” and ECIP-1017 to institute a supply cap with asymptotic supply curve.

The decision-making process could be better organised, more transparent and clearly defined and refinements to the ECIP process are currently being discussed. At present most informal community discussion takes place on ETC’s Discord server, with ECIPs themselves posted on the nominated Github account (ethereumclassic) following a power struggle and takeover of the previous canonical Github account (ethereumproject), ostensibly related to the situation with ETCLabs discussed below. ETCLabs appear to be preparing to implement their own proposed parallel “ECLIP” improvement proposal scheme though this may be a mis-communication rather than a “consensus hostage situation” — situation is unclear at time of writing. Below are a few links to recent discussions and proposals relating to how Ethereum Classic reaches decisions relating to network upgrades and changes.

Ethereum Classic (ETC): Putting Together the New Decentralized ECIP Process

Ethereum Classic Improvement Proposals

ethereumclassic/ECIPs

Some stakeholders in ETC want to see closer collaboration with ETH, some are ambivalent and others are opposed. The recent announcement of Bob Summerwill as ETC Cooperative Executive Director is noteworthy as he was instrumental in founding the Enterprise ETH Alliance, was involved in the Ethereum Foundation, was a senior figure at Consensys. There are some existing collaborative projects between ETH and ETC, including Akomba Labs’ “Peace Bridge” to allow cross-chain transactions, Kotti unified PoA testnet and some recent discussions regarding ETC considering the adoption of aspects of the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap.

The last few months have seen a change in the composition of the ecosystem around Ethereum Classic, as a the previously pre-eminent privately funded core development team “ETCdev” collapsed due to lack of funds with another entity “ETCLabs” forming a new developer team “ETCLabs Core” with significant overlap of personnel. Some community members have described the sequence of events as a corporate takeover attempt, others do not seem so worried.

“The ETC community is still small and, in this bear market, lacks funding from volunteer investors or other sources to initiate new core maintenance and development projects or pay new core developers quickly. This is because there are no leaders, foundations, pre-mines, treasuries, protocol taxation or any other financing gimmicks that so much contaminate other centralized projects.”

ETC History and Network Characteristics

The Ethereum blockchain launched on 30th July 2015. When the Ethereum Foundation conducted a hard fork as part of TheDAO’s exploit recovery (“irregular state transition”) on July 20th 2016, they kept the name and ticker symbol Ethereum / ETH. The canonical chain branch in which TheDAO exploiter kept their spoils survived against most observers expectations and attracted community, developer, exchange and mining support. The unforked chain came to be known as Ethereum Classic (ETC).

Ethereum Classic (ETC) is pure Proof of Work utilising the Ethash (Dagger Hashimoto) algorithm. It is the second largest network using this algorithm, marshalling approximately 15–25x times less hashrate than Ethereum (ETH). Due to its situation as a minority PoW network without 51% attack mitigations at the protocol or node levels it has been deemed to be vulnerable to thermodynamic attacks and this has been observed recently. Mining is permissionless so the identities and extent of participation of block producers are not necessarily known. Some network and blockchain analysis of the ETC mining ecosystem is being undertaken currently. There is a high degree of suspicion that covert FPGA and/or ASIC mining was employed leading to the recent majority attacks. Most of the hashrate employed in the recent attacks is suspected to be of exogenous origin to the existing Ethash ecosystem and marketplaces such as Nicehash.

Ethereum’s whitepaper was first circulated in late 2013 and there was a “token crowdfunding” (= ICO) in 2014. Approx 72 million of the 105 million supply issued were distributed in the ICO. Mining providing block and uncle rewards has distributed the remainder. Work is ongoing currently to compare the movement of balances either side of the ETC/ETH fork. Inflation was set to “5M20”, reducing mining rewards by 20% every 5 million blocks which corresponds to approximately 5% annual supply increase. The same hard fork in 2017 (ECIP-1017) also installed a fixed supply cap.

Ethereum “became” Ethereum Classic because the Ethereum Foundation asserted intellectual property rights over the “Ethereum” name despite branching away from the canonical chain. This is still a point of contention and some prefer the name “ETC” as a subset of stakeholders look for alternative nomenclature to “Classic”.

How are Development and Ecosystem Activities Funded in ETC?

What is the reference node implementation?
This is also a bone of contention in ETC. When ETCdev ceased operation, the hitherto canonical client Classic-Geth written in Golang stopped being reliably maintained. ETCLabs Core maintains Multi-Geth but not all stakeholders in the ETC ecosystem are currently comfortable using their software given their ostensible desire to have an independent ECLIP improvement proposal pathway which appears more hard-fork than soft-fork oriented.

Are there any other full node implementations?
Parity Labs maintains their Parity client written in Rust.

IOHK maintains their Mantis client written in Scala.

How is client development funded?
Development is funded by private organisations — ETCLabs, Parity and IOHK fund client development following the demise of ETCdev. ETC Cooperative (partly funded by DCG/Grayscale and DFG) also support protocol development.

There has been resistance to adopt an on-chain treasury as proposed by IOHK, some stakeholders see this as inherently centralising but given the collapse of ETCdev due to funding shortfalls and absence of alternative funding models / “build it and they will come” the status quo is at risk of prolonging a continuing tragic commons scenario. There are some grants and funding opportunities via ETCLabs but at present are focused on business/startup incubation.

Most funds are controlled by companies but ETC Cooperative is now a 501(c)(3) non profit based in the USA. There is also a small community fund controlled by a multi-signature wallet but there are no current plans to disburse this.

What other software does the entity(ies) which funds the reference node produce?
Hard to answer conclusively since there is a lack of agreement over what the reference implementation currently is.

Parity — Rust ETH client, Polkadot/Substrate, Bitcoin client, Zcash client.

ETCdev — defunct, Emerald application development framework and tools, Orbita sidechains.

ETC Cooperative — developer tooling and infrastructure e.g. recent Google BigQuery integration.

IOHK — a lot of software for Cardano, ZenCash, ETC.

ETCLabs — ?

What else do the entities which develop or fund the reference node do? (not software)

Parity — Web3 Foundation

ETCLabs — VC/Startup incubator

ETC Coop — General PR, community and ecosystem development, conference organisation, enterprise & developer relations

IOHK — PR, summits, art projects (Symphony of Blockchains), academic collaborations, VC partnership and research fellowships with dLab / SoSV / Emurgo….

DCG/Grayscale/CoinDesk — PR, financial instruments e.g. ETC Trust, OTC trading…

How is work other than development (e.g. marketing) funded?
It in unclear how funding and support for non-development activities is apportioned.

DCG/Grayscale and DFG fund ETC Cooperative

DFG funds ETC Labs

Related projects — Are there any significant projects which are related? For example, is this a fork of another project? Have other projects forked this one?
Ethereum (ETH) was a ledger fork of this project, Callisto (CLO) was a ledger fork of this project. There may have been more minor codebase or ledger forks.

Significant Entities and Ecosystem Stakeholders

ETCLabs is a for-profit company with VC/Startup and core development activities funded by DFG, DCG, IOHK and Foxconn.

ETC Cooperative is a 501(c)(3) non profit based in the USA funded by DCG and DFG.

ETCdev (defunct)

IOHK (Input Output Hong Kong) is the company led by Charles Hoskinson who previously worked on BitShares, Ethereum and now Cardano.

DCG (Digital Currency Group) is Barry Silbert’s concern which contains in its orbit Grayscale Investments, CoinDesk, Genesis OTC Trading amongst other organisations.

DFG (Digital Finance Group) is Chinese diversified group concerned with investments in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry, OTC Trading, Venture Funds.

Wassim Alsindi directs research at independent laboratory Parallel Industries, analysing cryptocurrency networks from data-driven and human perspectives. Find him at www.pllel.com and @parallelind on Twitter.