First published 20 May 2020. Expanded in October 2026 so a familiar address is not treated as Ethereum, and so the supply cap is not left as a rumour. On 20 July 2016, at block 1,920,000, Ethereum changed its ledger to undo the theft from The DAO, a crowdfunding contract that had been drained the month before. Most miners and the Ethereum brand followed that change. A minority kept producing the original history. Markets called those coins Ethereum Classic, ticker ETC. ETH is the chain that rewrote the theft. ETC is the chain that did not. They share a past and not a future.
Ethereum without the jargon is the other chain. This page is the one that stayed with proof of work.
Same shape of address, different notebook
An ETC address starts with 0x, like an Ethereum address. Chain id 61 has been ETC’s since a 2017 upgrade that added replay protection, so a signature for one chain is not supposed to be valid on the other. Protection is not a reason to paste the address into the wrong withdraw screen. A transfer sent on Ethereum does not arrive on Ethereum Classic, and the reverse strands the coins the same way. The wrong network is still the wrong city. Read the network badge out loud: Ethereum Classic, not Ethereum, not an Ethereum layer 2.
The software looks like Ethereum’s because it forked from it. A contract written for a later Ethereum upgrade is not automatically a contract ETC will run. “EVM” on a label is a family name, not a promise the bytecode matches this year’s Ethereum.
A cap, and a chain that did not merge
In December 2017 the network capped issuance. The policy is a ceiling of 210,700,000 ETC, with the block reward falling by 20 percent every five million blocks. That is not Bitcoin’s halving, and it is not a statement that the price must resemble bitcoin’s. Coins already issued are not affected by the next cut. A page that still describes ETC as inflating forever is describing the chain from before that policy.
The Merge changed how Ethereum agrees. It did not, by itself, cheapen the meter. It also did not happen to ETC. Ethereum moved to proof of stake in September 2022. Ethereum Classic stayed with miners. Fees are still an auction priced in ETC. Staking, on this chain, is not a thing you do with the coin.
What a minority proof-of-work chain can suffer
In January 2019, and three more times in the summer of 2020, an attacker published a longer competing history. Exchanges that had already credited deposits lost coins when that history replaced the one they had seen. The rule that did it is the ordinary proof-of-work rule: the chain with the most work wins. A confirmation count on a deposit screen is the exchange’s waiting period, not a property of the coin. This page will not describe how the attacker assembled the hashrate. The useful fact is the one a depositor can use: a ticker with a small miner set can be reorganised, and the exchange eats the loss or you do.
Nothing here is an instruction to mine, buy, or move ETC.
