Ethereum Classic(ETC)

The widely-recognized Ethereum blockchain launched by Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood in July 2015, raised $150 million through an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) conducted by ‘The DAO’, in April 2016. However, a hacker stole $3.6 million three months later, by exploiting a bug in one of The DAO’s smart contracts.

The Ethereum blockchain as we know it today rolled back the chain and reverted it to its original unhacked status in July 2016. However, a section of the Ethereum community which believed in immutability as one of the core ethos of crypto networks, kept propagating the original Ethereum blockchain, with no ledger rewrites, calling it Ethereum Classic.

Ethereum Classic is committed to staying as a Proof of Work (PoW) network, in pursuit of decentralization maximalism, quite unlike its sibling which is soon transitioning to Proof of Stake. Its community lays great emphasis on two core principles – immutability and censorship resistance – with ‘Code is Law’ being the governance motto. 

Ethereum Classic further distanced itself from Ethereum over time, as it put a hard cap on ETC’s maximum supply (210,700,000 coins) and adopted a Bitcoin-like deflationary monetary policy by introducing a regular reduction in block rewards. It aims to be the go-to platform for smart contract development which helps developers create unstoppable applications.

ETC price

When the Ethereum hard fork happened in July 2016, all investors who held ETH in their wallets were given the same amount of ETC coins for free. The ETC price kept fluctuating mostly between $1 to $2 from the time of its launch, until March 2017, when after introducing a Bitcoin-like deflationary monetary policy and the announcement of Grayscale ETCG Investment Fund, ETC price started climbing upwards and breached $20 for the first time in June 2017. Its next noteworthy surge came during the crypto boom of 2018, when ETC price reached $43.76 on Jan. 13, 2018. However, it retraced to under $20 within a month and continued its fall further after a brief spike in February, trading well under $10 by Q3, 2018. It closed that year at around $5. 

The ETC price remained mostly below $10 for a little over two years, and showed some signs of revival only around February 2021, amid a market-wide bull run. It went on to record its all-time high of nearly $180 on May 6, 2021. A corrective phase followed and ETC coin was trading in the vicinity of $50 within a month. It stayed within the range of $40 to $70 for the remainder of the year, closing 2021 at a market value of $35. ETC price carried its poor form into 2022, trading mostly under $30 until the end of Q1, when it briefly surged yet again, to breach $50 towards the end of March 2022, but only to lose its ground amidst bearish pressure, and crashing to below $20 in June, 2022.

How ETC works

After the Ethereum hard fork, Ethereum Classic retained most of Ethereum’s original architecture and technical features and continued using the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Its blockchain is still account-based, comprising ‘contract accounts’ operated through a code (for automatic transaction executions), and ‘external accounts’ which are managed through private keys. The former are referred to as smart contracts, which allow for the creation of decentralized applications (DApps). One of the main aims of Ethereum Classic is to always enable censorship-free execution of such smart contracts. 

Ethereum Classic works based on Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism and uses an upgraded version of ETHash algorithm, called ETCHash. In 2020, after Ethereum’s DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) exceeded 4GB, Ethereum Classic tweaked the ETHash algorithm to make sure that even GPUs with 4GB memory could continue mining ETC, at least until around mid-2025. Ethereum Classic’s block generation time is 15 seconds and miners are given a block reward of 2.56 ETC per block.

ETC, the native coin of Ethereum Classic, is used to pay for using its computational resources. As in Ethereum, one needs to pay gas fees for the execution of smart contract functions and coin transactions. However, in this case, these fees are paid in ETC coins. This payment goes to miners who validate transactions, perform smart contract computations and add new blocks to the chain. Besides being a payment mechanism for blockchain transactions, ETC, owing to its deflationary nature, is also used as a store of value.

ETC news, updates and highlights

The biggest ETC news to date remains how Ethereum Classic came into being in July 2016. The DAO attack and the entire episode led to the creation of two factions amongst Ethereum followers, with purists siding with the idea of retaining the original chain, thus birthing Ethereum Classic; and the other section going on to create what is popularly known as Ethereum today.

In more recent ETC news, Ethereum Classic integrated with Multichain, widely considered the leader in cross-chain routing protocols. The bridging solution will enable interoperability for the Ethereum Classic network. As a result, projects belonging to other networks will be able to offer support for and migrate easily to Ethereum Classic. 

Frequently asked questions about ETC

• Can you mine ETC cryptocurrency?

Yes, since Ethereum Classic is a Proof-of-Work blockchain, you can mine ETC coins using computers and specialized hardware including GPUs.

• Which are some of the best ETC wallets?

Some of the popular ETC wallets are MetaMask, MyEtherWallet, HTC Exodus, Bitski and Atomic Wallet. You can learn more on this page.

• What can you do with ETC coins?

You can hold your ETC coins and use them as a long-term store of value. It’s also possible to trade them against other crypto coins on popular exchanges.

• How can you buy Ethereum Classic coins?

You can buy ETC from various reputed crypto exchanges, by paying in a fiat currency, or with other cryptocurrencies, through trading pairs like ETC/USDT, ETC/XRP, ETC/BTC and ETC/ADA.