^^ Right, you can read about their hard fork here:
https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/11/05/1940811/0/en/%C3%86ternity-Blockchain-Developers-Take-on-Ethereum-with-Final-Hardfork.htmlLIECHTENSTEIN, Nov. 05, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The core development team for Æternity, a next-generation, open-source blockchain for building decentralized applications, today announced its LIMA hardfork, releasing the latest software to miners and in fact, handing over governance to the community. The third major æternity protocol upgrade this year, LIMA adds a sophisticated, improved Virtual Machine, governance, and naming system to challenge Ethereum and other blockchain platforms. Æternity is one of the most active blockchain developer communities measured by code activity. Core developers proposed hardfork, LIMA software release to miners, who will mine or not mine fork of aeternity blockchain.
The LIMA protocol upgrade introduces the Fast Æternity Transaction Engine, or FATE, a Virtual Machine optimized for æternity smart contracts. This powerful Virtual Machine outperforms other blockchain networks with better efficiency and 10 times less gas consumption, giving developers the advantage of low fees, even when scaling quickly.
This upgrade delivers improvements to state channels, which the æternity network relies on to power scalability. Built into æternity’s first layer, opening a lightweight state channel is a simple transaction, with computation completed by a trusted node. Once set up, state channel users do not need to pay fees or spend gas to execute smart contracts and transactions. All communications are private until published on-chain in the case of a dispute or after the closing of the channel.
But I'm not sure about the break up though, if they did, the project is still running and even improved and even says that they outperformed other blockchain, with less gas (very good). So they might be looking to compete with Ethereum's 2.0 next year.