While too cute kittens recently showed Ethereum‘s difficulties with the scalability (ability to scale up) of the original Ethereum blockchain, Ethereum Classic intends to solve this problem with the launch of Callisto.
Ethereum Classic (ETC)?
Ethereum Classic is the original Ethereum blockchain. After The Dao hack last year, Vitalik Buterin decided to fork Ethereum, i.e., duplicate the blockchain by applying modifications.
If this is financially understandable, it raises an ethical question: Should a blockchain be modifiable by its creator?
A group of developers determined to defend the concept of immutability then launched Ethereum Classic, the original Ethereum blockchain before the fork. Since then, the project has matured: it is a crypto with new features that are regularly released.
Callisto was one of the big new features announced by the ETC team.
Callisto (CLO), a sidechain created to experiment
Callisto is a sidechain (alternative blockchain) announced on January 11, 2018 by Ethereum Commonwealth, the latest ETC team.
If the financial aspect interests many investors (1 CLO will be distributed for each ETC), the project announces very good things technologically.
Callisto is a way to experiment with new features that may eventually be included in the Ethereum Classic protocol. But above all, it is a solution to scalability problems, since the team plans cross-chain updates. This barbaric term means that it will, in theory, be possible to use CLO smart contracts on the ETC blockchain and vice versa.
Gone are the days when ETC was just the original ETH blockchain. Callisto is a proof of maturity, a way for ETC to assert itself as an independent blockchain with its own functionalities. It not only settles the ethical concerns of Ethereum but also intends to settle its technical concerns!
And yes, Ethereum today suffers from scalability problems, an anglicism used to talk about systems that cannot bear the load of the growth in the number of users. We have seen it with the network totally congested because of CryptoKitties, but it is also the case with Bitcoin and its slow and expensive transactions today! ETC, thanks to Callisto, hopes to be able to fix all these problems.