The Ethereum Classic mystery deepened this week when former ETCDEV lead developer Igor Artamonov took to Medium to allege an attempted takeover of the project. The news came around the same time as Artamonov closed down the ETCDEV program citing funding issues, but his blog post shines a very different light on recent events.
Artamonov claims that for the past month he and his team have been “experiencing an attempt of a takeover of ETCDEV and ETC”, adding that he had “no other choice” than to publish details of the takeover. His initial claim that his team had simply run out of funding seems to be surrounded by a backstory of abused trust, infighting, and Trojan developers leading to a coup d’état.
Stabbed in the Back by “Business Partners”
The story goes something like this. ETCDEV’s recent financial troubles resulted in Artamonov asking other development teams for short-term funding. But, instead Artamonov was asked to take a representative from DFG, one of these dev teams, on board. Artamonov says he reluctantly agreed to this, and even secured some funding from DFG, but soon afterwards another dev team, ETC Labs, made covert approaches to ETCDEV developers to work for them. The DFG representative inside ETCDEV then secretly copied all ETCDEV’s work to the ETC Labs Github and locked Artamonov out. The ETCDEV social media pages were also locked so Artamonov was unable to access them.
Moving On
Artamonov claims that the drop in Bitcoin and Ethereum Classic prices through 2018 are not the reason for his reduced funding, instead reinforcing that he was cut off from this funding source by his “business partners”. Whilst clearly affected by the actions of the other development teams and their heads, Artamonov says that his time with Ethereum Classic is over and he is looking for other projects.
What the future holds for Ethereum Classic is uncertain, but with the former ETCDEV developers having predominantly moved over to ETC Labs along with the code, it seems that Artamonov’s work may continue but under the name of a different development team.
