Ethereum Classic (ETC) ETC

Ethereum Classic (ETC) is the blockchain that refused to undo the DAO hack. When Ethereum changed its own ledger on 20 July 2016 to pull about 12 million ETH out of the hacked DAO contracts, a minority of miners and users kept running the old rules, and that unchanged ledger became Ethereum Classic. Ten years on it is a proof-of-work chain for Ethereum-style smart contracts, with supply capped near 210.7 million ETC.

Since Ethereum moved to proof of stake in September 2022, ETC has been the largest smart-contract chain still secured by miners. Its block reward fell by 20% to 1.6384 ETC in July 2026, and Olympia, a contested upgrade that would add a fee market and a development treasury, was still a draft in November 2026. Price and market data sit in the live panel on this page.

What is Ethereum Classic?

It is a layer-1 blockchain that shares its first 1,920,000 blocks with Ethereum: everything recorded from Ethereum’s launch on 30 July 2015 up to the DAO fork exists on both chains. After that block the histories separate, with ETH on one side and ETC on the other.

The project sums up its stance as “code is law”: a contract runs as written, even when the result is a theft. Its official site, on a page it labels as opinionated, says ETC “has never and will never stop or interfere with Smart Contracts deployed to it”.

Under the hood, ETC runs the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), so Solidity contracts and Ethereum wallets work on it, while miners secure it the way they secure Bitcoin. No company runs it. Changes go through public proposals called ECIPs, written by a handful of developers, client teams and non-profits such as the ETC Cooperative.

The DAO hack and the 2016 split behind “code is law”

The DAO was an investment fund written as a smart contract on Ethereum. On 17 June 2016 the Ethereum Foundation warned that an attacker was draining its ether into a “child DAO” by calling the split function recursively, collecting funds many times in one transaction. The bug was in the DAO, not in Ethereum, and the attacker could not withdraw for about 27 days.

That delay opened a debate over whether the protocol itself should step in. On 15 July the Foundation said a community poll called Carbonvote, in which holders signalled with their coins, would set the default option of the Geth client at block 1,894,000. The default became the fork.

At block 1,920,000, mined on 20 July 2016 at 13:20 UTC, Ethereum executed what its developers called an “irregular state change”: about 12 million ETH moved from the attacker’s “Dark DAO” and a “Whitehat DAO” into a recovery contract from which DAO investors could claim their ether. The Foundation wrote that “the fork itself took place smoothly, with roughly 85% of miners mining on the fork”.

The rest did not follow. Users who wanted to stay on the unforked chain could run Geth with a flag called –oppose-dao-fork, and the Foundation’s own notice warned them about replay attacks, where a transaction signed for one chain can be broadcast on the other. The coin of that chain took the ticker ETC. For its defenders, a ledger that a majority can rewrite to save a popular project is no longer neutral; our guide on why a blockchain is hard to change explains what immutability does and does not mean.

How Ethereum Classic works: Etchash mining, the EVM and its clients

Proof of work with Etchash

ETC uses proof of work: miners compete to find each block and the winner collects the reward plus fees. A block arrives every 13 to 14 seconds; on the Blockscout explorer, the average since block 25,000,000 (22 July 2026) worked out at about 13.5 seconds in early November 2026.

The algorithm is Etchash, a modified Ethash introduced by ECIP-1099 at block 11,700,000 on 28 November 2020 (the Thanos upgrade). It slowed the growth of the DAG, the dataset miners hold in memory, so that 4 GB graphics cards could keep mining for years longer. The ECIP itself noted that ASICs able to match GPU miners had already been built. Dedicated Etchash ASIC machines are sold today.

EVM compatibility, a few steps behind Ethereum

ETC copies Ethereum’s EVM changes selectively. Phoenix (2020) brought in Ethereum’s Istanbul changes; Magneto and Mystique added parts of Berlin and London but left out EIP-1559, the fee market that burns part of every fee on Ethereum. Spiral (February 2024) added a subset of Shanghai. Nothing from Cancun onwards is live. Bastion (ECIP-1130), a draft of 30 June 2026, proposes some of it, with no activation block.

Clients

Core-Geth, a fork of Go Ethereum, has long been the main node software. Its version 1.12.21 of 18 March 2026 was an emergency patch against “an active attack against Ethereum Classic bootnodes” that made nodes crash-loop. In its June 2026 update on GitHub, the Olympia team listed four execution clients running and signalling Olympia as the next hard fork: Fukuii, a new ETC-native client, Core-Geth, Besu and Nethermind, which joined that month. The same update calls the current Core-Geth series the last before the client is retired.

ETC supply: the 5M20 schedule and the 210.7 million ceiling

ETC first inherited Ethereum’s open-ended issuance. ECIP-1017, written in November 2016 and activated with the Gotham upgrade at block 5,000,000 on 11 December 2017, replaced it with a rule known as 5M20: every 5 million blocks, a period called an era, the block reward falls by 20%.

The first era paid 5 ETC per block. Block 25,000,000, mined on 22 July 2026, paid exactly 1.6384 ETC, the sixth-era reward, and the blocks after it pay the same. ECIP-1017 also cut rewards for uncles (valid blocks that lose the race) from era 2, which makes the final total easier to predict.

Era	Reward from block	Base reward per block	Started
1	Genesis	5 ETC	30 July 2015
2	5,000,000	4 ETC	11 December 2017
3	10,000,000	3.2 ETC	17 March 2020
4	15,000,000	2.56 ETC	25 April 2022
5	20,000,000	2.048 ETC	31 May 2024
6	25,000,000	1.6384 ETC	22 July 2026
7	30,000,000	1.31072 ETC	Around September 2028 (our estimate)

Start dates are the explorer timestamps of each boundary block. The next cut is set by height, not by date: at block 30,000,000 the reward drops to 1.31072 ETC. On 6 November 2026 the chain stood near block 25,682,000. At the pace seen since July, about 13.5 seconds a block, the remaining 4.3 million blocks take roughly 22 months, which points to mid-September 2028; blocks closer to 14 seconds would push it into early October. That is our estimate, not an official date.

The 210.7 million figure is a ceiling. ECIP-1017 says supply cannot exceed it even if every block carried two uncles forever, and would not fall below 198.5 million at the 5.4% uncle rate of the first era. Eras have lasted a little over two years each, so ETC trims issuance about twice as often as Bitcoin, which halves its reward every 210,000 blocks, roughly four years.

Ethereum Classic timeline: from the split to Spiral

Dates are the explorer timestamps of the activation blocks, in UTC.

Date	Block	Event
30 July 2015	0	Ethereum launches; ETC keeps this genesis
20 July 2016	1,920,000	DAO fork on Ethereum; the unforked chain continues as ETC
13 January 2017	3,000,000	Die Hard: difficulty bomb paused, replay protection (EIP-155)
11 December 2017	5,000,000	Gotham: 5M20 monetary policy (ECIP-1017)
29 May 2018	5,900,000	Difficulty bomb removed (ECIP-1041)
12 September 2019	8,772,000	Atlantis: Byzantium-era EVM features
12 January 2020	9,573,000	Agharta: Constantinople and Petersburg features
31 May 2020	10,500,839	Phoenix: Ethereum’s Istanbul changes
28 November 2020	11,700,000	Thanos: Etchash (ECIP-1099)
24 July 2021	13,189,133	Magneto: Berlin features
12 February 2022	14,525,000	Mystique: London features without EIP-1559
5 February 2024	19,250,000	Spiral: Shanghai subset; MESS switched off

What ETC turned down says as much. In the weeks after the August 2020 attacks, a proposal to move mining to SHA-3 was rejected, and plans for RandomX mining, IOHK’s checkpointing and a protocol treasury (ECIP-1098) were withdrawn, the treasury in 2021 after an open campaign against it. The treasury idea came back in 2025 with Olympia.

51% attacks on Ethereum Classic in 2019 and 2020

Whoever controls most of a proof-of-work chain’s mining power, even for hours, can mine a private chain, spend coins on the public one (often a deposit at an exchange), then publish the longer private chain so the deposit vanishes. That is a 51% attack. Our guide can a blockchain be hacked? sets it apart from contract bugs and exchange hacks.

The first serious case came in January 2019. Coinbase said on Monday 7 January that it had detected a deep chain reorganisation on 5 January and halted ETC sends and receives; CNBC reported nearly $500,000 of ETC spent twice. Coinbase’s updated count, quoted by Security Affairs, reached 219,500 ETC double-spent across 12 further reorganisations.

August 2020 brought more. IOG, which also worked on ETC at the time, counted four attacks in 2019 and 2020, three of them weeks apart, and wrote of “expensive losses for stakeholders due to double spending and service disruption”. Coinbase’s post-mortem of the two early-August attacks put the assets stolen from exchanges at about $9 million, none of it from Coinbase customers, Decrypt reported. Running several node clients helped it spot the split, and it “chose to significantly raise our confirmation count requirement.”

The network’s main answer was MESS (ECIP-1100), a rule added to Core-Geth that makes a node increasingly reluctant to switch to a long competing chain that shows up late. IOG wrote in October 2020 that MESS was the fix closest to adoption, while warning there was no guarantee it would stop further attacks. MESS was switched off by default with Spiral: ECIP-1110 argued that with Ethereum gone from mining, ETC had become “the largest apparent sink of compatible hashrate”. We found no comparable attack reported since 2020. The risk is quieter, not gone.

After the Merge: the largest proof-of-work EVM chain

Ethereum switched to proof of stake on 15 September 2022, and its miners went looking for work. Decrypt reported that day that ETC’s hashrate jumped from 66.54 TH/s to 265.43 TH/s, per 2Miners data. It did not last: FXStreet reported on 26 September that it had dropped 47% in ten days, to about 160.8 TH/s.

Hashrate is hard to pin down. Dividing the difficulty of the latest block by the average block time gives roughly 180 TH/s on 6 November 2026, a rough estimate of our own; public trackers showed figures between about 150 and 210 TH/s during 2026. ECIP-1110 estimated in 2023 that ETC drew about 85% of the apparent supply of Ethash-type hashrate. That cuts both ways: little idle hashrate is left to rent for an attack, and little sits in reserve to come to the chain’s defence.

Ethereum Classic use cases: contracts, mining and a trust

The project’s own thesis is ETC as “hard money” with smart contracts: a ceiling on supply, falling issuance and rules that are not rewritten after the fact.

On-chain use is modest. Blockscout counted about 145 million transactions in the chain’s history and roughly 11,500 on 6 November 2026, with blocks less than 1% full on average. Wallets such as MetaMask connect to it as an EVM network, and a few small DEXs and apps run on it.

For owners of Etchash hardware, ETC is the main chain to mine. US investors also have a wrapper: the Grayscale Ethereum Classic Trust (ETCG), quoted over the counter on OTCQX, held about 10.85 million ETC on 30 June 2026, according to its quarterly report filed with the SEC on 4 August. It charges a 2.5% yearly fee and runs no redemption programme. It is not an ETF.

Olympia: a fee market and a treasury, still in draft

Olympia is the biggest change proposed for ETC in years. Its core, ECIP-1111, would turn on Ethereum’s EIP-1559 fee market, but instead of burning the base fee as Ethereum does, it would credit it to a fixed treasury address, the “Sovereignty Vault”, to fund development. Miners would keep their block reward and tips. Companion drafts (ECIP-1112 to 1114) describe the vault, a DAO to govern it and a process for funding requests.

Supporters say ETC needs a steady budget for client developers. Opponents see a protocol treasury as a break with the chain’s neutrality, an argument made in September 2021 against the earlier treasury plan in a paper titled “Let’s keep Ethereum Classic Classic”. A joint post on the ETC blog of 30 March 2026 found general agreement on adopting a fee market; the fight is over who gets the base fee. Other drafts would pay it to miners: 95% under ECIP-1116, all of it under ECIP-1120.

When the ECIP repository was last updated, on 12 September 2026, every Olympia ECIP was still a Draft, and the client spec (ECIP-1121) listed the activation block as TBD on both the Mordor testnet and mainnet. ECIP-1111 requires cross-client tests on Mordor before a mainnet block is scheduled. The July 2025 review post targeted mainnet by the end of 2026; the June 2026 update said “before 2027”. No activation date has been set.

Ethereum Classic and US regulation

ETC has no issuer and no company behind it. The SEC interpretation of 17 March 2026, published with CFTC guidance, gives 16 crypto assets as examples of digital commodities, among them Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash. ETC is not on that list, which offers examples rather than a complete roll, and we found no SEC or CFTC statement specific to it. In the EU, the MiCA rules bear on the exchanges and custodians that offer ETC.

Risks of Ethereum Classic

• Security depends on hashrate. ETC was hit by several 51% attacks in 2019 and 2020 and its hashrate is small next to Bitcoin’s, so exchanges may hold deposits for many confirmations.
• Development rests on a small group of contributors with no protocol budget. Olympia is meant to fix that, and the fix itself divides the community.
• A contested hard fork could leave two versions of ETC running side by side if miners, exchanges and node operators disagree.
• The EVM lags Ethereum by several upgrades, so some contracts and tools built for Ethereum today will not work unchanged.
• On-chain activity is low, and liquidity varies a lot between trading venues.

Ethereum Classic vs Ethereum

Both chains share code and a genesis block, and little else since 2022.

	Ethereum Classic (ETC)	Ethereum (ETH)
History after block 1,920,000	DAO theft left in place	Funds moved to a recovery contract
Consensus	Proof of work (Etchash)	Proof of stake since 15 September 2022
Supply	Ceiling of about 210.7 million	No fixed cap; part of fees burned
Fee market	Legacy gas auction; EIP-1559 proposed (Olympia)	EIP-1559 since 2021
EVM	Up to a subset of Shanghai	Latest Ethereum upgrades
Block time	About 13 to 14 seconds	12-second slots

How to buy and store ETC

Among the exchanges Coindaro has reviewed, Kraken, Coinbase, Binance, OKX, Bybit, Crypto.com, Bitget, Bitpanda and Bitvavo listed ETC in November 2026, against euros, dollars or stablecoins depending on the venue and your country; Gemini had no ETC pair in its public market list. Check which pairs your account can use before depositing.

To hold ETC yourself, use a wallet that supports the Ethereum Classic network (chain ID 61), not Ethereum mainnet. ETC and ETH addresses use the same format, so sending ETC to an exchange’s ETH deposit address, or the reverse, can lose the funds. Send a small test amount first and keep the recovery phrase offline.

Two milestones to watch: a Mordor testnet block for Olympia, the step before any mainnet date, and block 30,000,000, when the reward falls to 1.31072 ETC.