Project history¶

The code and the maintaining team have separate lineages, and neither is a straight line. This page traces both, because knowing where a consensus client comes from is part of deciding whether to run it.

The code¶

go-ethereum began in December 2013. multi-geth forked it in March 2018 to support several networks from a single client, holding chain rules as configuration rather than as code branches. Core-Geth forked from multi-geth in 2020 and kept that model, which is why adding a network here is a chain configuration rather than a new client.

The Go module path is still github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum, and every internal import uses it. That is deliberate downstream compatibility, not a leftover.

The maintainers¶

Sorpaas led multi-geth’s development from its start in 2018 until 2020.

ETC Labs Core formed in December 2018, many of its developers having previously been part of ETCDEV, which supported the Classic Geth client. It led development through the fork and rebrand of multi-geth to Core-Geth in 2020, publishing as ETC Labs and ETC Core.

ETC Labs left the Ethereum Classic ecosystem in 2021. From January 2022 the work was funded by the ETC Cooperative, as it announced in December 2021. The Cooperative entered maintenance mode at the end of 2024, as its 2024 retrospective states and its Q1 2025 report confirms: “we are now in maintenance mode and spending has decreased significantly.” It stopped developing Core-Geth in 2025 and wound down its team.

The organizations¶

The ETC Cooperative transition lists which services are moving where as the Cooperative winds down.

This repository¶

Maintenance moved to ethereumclassic/core-geth, the Ethereum Classic community repository, created on 21 December 2024 from the preceding repository at commit 7ef3ecd7a (16 December 2024). That commit is preserved on the archive-etclabscore-2024-12 branch and tagged archive/etclabscore-2024-12, so the full history before the move is intact and checkable.

The Cooperative’s own 2024 retrospective reproduces a conference slide by its Senior Editor, Donald McIntyre, proposing “Move Core Geth to the Ethereum Classic community repository” (page 24 of the PDF). Keeping a reference client in the project’s own organization is ordinary practice, as with Bitcoin Core at bitcoin/bitcoin and go-ethereum at ethereum/go-ethereum.

The same proposal is on the Cooperative’s own published roadmap. Ethereum Classic Pathways, published on 30 July 2024 and attributed to the ETC Cooperative, Istora and Donald McIntyre, lists: “Move Core Geth to the Ethereum Classic community GitHub repository: This would restore sovereignty of the community on the node client software.”

The community website’s client entry has not followed. ethereumclassic.org/development/clients still sends readers to the previous project: its documentation site, its installation guide, its releases and its support channel. An operator who follows the website lands there rather than here. #1678, opened on 20 March 2026 by a member of the Cooperative’s board, would point that entry at this repository and remove the previous organization’s link from the site footer. It has not been merged. The same pull request carries a draft migration announcement for the website, written by its author on 2 August 2026 and readable on the site’s own deploy preview, which places the client’s move in the consolidation the Cooperative announced in July 2024 and counts the community Discord’s November 2025 move as part of it. That announcement has not been published either. Three days before it, the website’s footer link to this repository was reverted to the previous organization’s GitHub page in #1676, a revert three reviewers approved, one of them recording that “the etclabs repo is not maintained” and that “a longer term solution needs to be found”. v1.12.21 was published from the previous repository the following day.

The maintenance gap¶

After maintenance moved, the client went unfunded and unmaintained. The March 2026 security audit counts 21 months without security maintenance, from the v1.12.20 release in June 2024 to March 2026. The previous repository received no commit between January 2025 and March 2026, and security disclosures sent to it privately in 2025 went unanswered.

2026: the security work and the modernization¶

In February 2026 White B0x began modernizing the client here for the Ethereum Classic DAO: patching the outstanding CVEs, moving to a supported Go toolchain, and rebuilding the release pipeline. In February and March 2026 it reported that security work privately to the ETC Cooperative, which owns the previous repository. A live attack on Ethereum Classic bootnodes in March 2026 then confirmed the exposure.

The work reported privately was cut into the emergency v1.12.21 and v1.12.22 releases in the previous repository, which gave v1.12.x operators immediate relief while v1.13 was tested on Ethereum Classic mainnet and Mordor from February to September 2026. The same fixes were submitted here as 27 individually scoped pull requests, #10 through #36, on 20 and 21 March 2026.

v1.13.0 shipped on 14 September 2026, the first release published from this repository. What it fixes, and how each claim about it checks out against the record, are in the release report and v1.13.0: the record behind the release.

Timeline¶

This is where the code and its links have lived. The disclosure record, which vulnerability was reported when and where each fix landed, is the March 2026 security audit’s own timeline and is not repeated here.

Supporting the work¶

Maintaining Core-Geth since it moved to the community repository has been unfunded public-goods work. Support this work says how to fund it.