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670K follower ETH Classic account turns into Ergo: What happened?

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has repurposed the Ethereum Classic Twitter account to now benefit the Ergo Platform.

Followers of the Ethereum Classic Twitter account may have found themselves the unintended fans of an entirely new crypto project after Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson turned the account into the new community page for the Ergo community.

The Ethereum Classic account had built up over 600,000 followers since its inception in July 2016, and up until Sept. 15, it has been used to post about Ethereum Classic.

As of Oct. 6, however, the Twitter page now reflects the Ergo Platform, a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain capable of facilitating smart contracts, similar to Ethereum, with links to Cardano.

In a lengthy thread pinned on Ethereum Classic’s new Twitter handle on Oct. 6, Bob Summerwill, the executive director of a public charity supporting Ethereum Classic, pointed the finger at Hoskinson for repurposing the account, noting that “6 years of community work has been erased.”

The new handle is yet to reach the follower numbers of its old account, with only 364 followers at the time of writing.

In the thread, Summerwill outlines how Hoskinson’s blockchain company Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) withdrew from the ETC for a second time following a lack of support for a proposal of his and refused to talk about the Twitter account until a Sep. 6 Twitter post where he declared he would not be returning it to the ETC community.

The move by Hoskinson has essentially boosted the Twitter followers of the Ergo Platform, which has the old handle of ergoplatformorg with only 64,000 followers. The Ergo account holder has even directed its followers to its “new account” Ergo_Platform.

Related: Cardano bulls run out of steam after Vasil hard fork — 40% ADA price crash in play

Issues between Hoskinson and his former project are not new, with Hoskinson being well known for his dislike of Ethereum and going as far as calling Ethereum Classic a “dead project with no purpose.”

Cardano Vasil upgrade ready with all ‘critical mass indicators’ achieved

With the countdown now under 24 hours for Cardano’s most ambitious upgrade, all three metrics necessary to launch the awaited Vasil upgrade have been met.

The Cardano Vasil upgrade is set to take place in less than 24 hours on Thursday, with the Cardano team noting all three “critical mass indicators” needed to trigger the upgrade are now met.

A Wednesday update on Twitter by the company behind Cardano, Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), states that within the last 48 hours, 13 cryptocurrency exchanges had confirmed their readiness for the hard fork, representing over 87% of Cardano’s (ADA) liquidity.

Of the top exchanges for ADA liquidity, Coinbase is the only exchange listed as “in progress” regarding its integration status, according to an ecosystem readiness page by IOHK.

However, a recent tweet by Coinbase has already hinted that it will support the fork, saying ADA transactions will be halted for maintenance “for the Cardano Vasil hard fork.”

Originally intended for a June launch, the Vasil upgrade has seen its launch day twice rescheduled, most recently due to a bug discovered in Cardano’s prior node version, which created incompatibility issues.

With an updated Vasil node in place, over 98% of mainnet blocks are now being created by the updated nodes, while the blockchain’s top decentralized applications (DApps) have also confirmed their readiness, marking all three metrics needed for the upgrade go-ahead. 

News of the upgrade has seen social media chatter about ADA increase by 35.16% over the past seven days from Monday, according to market intelligence platform Santiment, third behind Ripple and Ethereum.

Once live, the upgrade will be the blockchain’s most significant since its Alonzo hard fork in September last year, which brought functionality for smart contracts for the first time. This upgrade aims to bring smart contract enhancements, reduced costs and increased throughput on the network.

IOHK said one of the most significant upgrades brought by the fork is faster block creation as they can be transmitted without full validation.

Related: Cardano outranks Bitcoin in global top intimate brands in new report

The Vasil upgrade is named after the late artist Vasil Stoyanov Dabov, a Cardano community member and ambassador who passed away in December 2021 due to a pulmonary embolism.

Currently, ADA’s price sits at $0.44, according to CoinGecko, down 3.4% over 24 hours and down over 85% from its $3.09 all-time high on Sept. 2, 2021.

Fork of July: Cardano Vasil upgrade successfully launches on testnet

With the Cardano testnet hard fork complete, all that remains is to fork the mainnet, which will come in about four weeks or when developers have had enough time to prepare their tools for the upgrade.

The much-anticipated Vasil hard fork has been completed on the Cardano testnet, bringing it one major step closer to becoming a reality on the mainnet and promising broad performance upgrades.

Project developers, stake pool operators (SPO) and exchanges are now encouraged to deploy their work on the testnet to ensure integrations run smoothly when the mainnet gets the Vasil treatment in about four weeks.

Once completed on the mainnet, the Vasil hard fork will allow faster block creation and greater scalability for decentralized apps (DApps) running on Cardano. Input Output HK (IOHK), the organization that produced Cardano, said in a Sunday tweet that in addition to the performance upgrades, developers would benefit from “much-improved script performance and efficiency” and lower costs.

Vasil will also enable interoperability between Cardano sidechains, one of the main features developers intend to launch in the current Basho phase of the blockchain’s development. Basho is the fourth development phase for Cardano that focuses on scaling and will be followed up with the Voltaire phase, in which governance will be the main focus.

IOHK also noted that there would not be a proposal to hard fork the mainnet until “ecosystem partners are comfortable and ready,” but it is expected to come in about four weeks.

The previous phase, Goguen, saw the launch of smart contract capabilities on Cardano, which decentralized finance (DeFi) developers took advantage of by launching dozens of decentralized exchanges (DEX) and DeFi protocols, according to ecosystem tracker Cardano Cube.

Related: Ethereum fork a success as Sepolia testnet gears up to trial the Merge

Cardano’s top DApp with $49.7 million in total value locked (TVL) is currently the DEX WingRiders, according to the DeFi data compiler DefiLlama.

The testnet hard fork has done little to move Cardano (ADA) as it is only up 0.1% over the last 24 hours to $0.45, according to CoinGecko.