Multiple forks of Bitcoin blockchain created over last years has made it popular among the cryptocurrency community. The same trend is now happening with the second most popular network, Ethereum. According to a team of anonymous developers (who only have their names listed in the white paper), the EtherZero fork occurred on January 19, 2018, at block 4936270. However, there isn’t much information available about this project.
The article attempts to understand the issue by collecting all the information available till date.
For the first time, the EtherZero project became known at the end of December 2017, and as it was reported then, it is a “new generation of a platform for developing smart contracts created by a group of professional developers of decentralized standalone applications (DAPP).” Among the main features of EtherZero are a two-level network system using the Dash master node architecture, a system of offline community management, zero commissions, instant transfers and, finally, high scalability.
At the same time, nothing is said about the EtherZero hard fork on the official Ethereum website: ethereum.org, no comments are given by the network developers either.
Interesting, that in the early January the post appeared in the project thread on Bitcointalk: due to the lack of support from the community and large trading platforms, the project launch is canceled. After some time this message was deleted, but the evidence of it has been preserved on the network.
The project devteam says that Ethereum users will receive about 116 million ETZ tokens, where 1 ETZ is equal to one ETH. They have also set an ambitious goal to “pick off” 10% of Ethereum capitalization ($ 102 billion as on January 21, 2018).
Also, the logos of various exchanges and wallets supposed to support the new coin are placed on the project site, but in fact, none of the major platforms reported this. However, ETZ is already being traded on Yobit, but the release of tokens, according to the developers, will be held only on Monday, January 22.
Moreover, the team of MyEtherWallet wallet has already criticized the project, stating the risks associated with it: “After looking into EthZero, we have no clarity as to (1) what the code is (2) who created it (3) if it is properly licensed. Coupled w/ multiple .exe’s that are malicious, we recommend NOT INSTALLING NOR USING ANYTHING RELATED TO ETHZERO AS IT PUTS YOUR SYSTEM & ETH AT RISK”
Doubts about the EtherZero consistency were expressed by the Metamask team, which has designated the project site as phishing. Nevertheless, the developers of EtherZero insist they are acting with the best intentions and warn about the presence of fake websites aimed at stealing users’ funds: to get ETZ it is suggested to enter private keys from wallets in a special field.
This information is confirmed by other users of the network.
Doubts and rejection of EtherZero by a significant part of the community are real. It is unlikely that the anonymity of the developers speaks in favor of the project, even though on the Facebook page of the 7Labs IT blog information appeared about the possible connection of EtherZero with the game project SmartPlay.tech. Indirectly, this theory is supported by the recent statement of SmartPlay.tech that the option of launching its own Ethereum fork, which would solve the network congestion problems, is being considered.
As it were, the EtherZero team reports that the fork, as planned, was successful.
The next steps are the launching of the official network nodes, the release of tokens, mining pool, and block explorer. Also, until the end of January, developers intend to work on improving the code to ensure network stability and publish the source code for trading platforms, external pools, and DAPP developers.
As the situation develops – the future events will provide a clear picture of what EtherZero is all about.