How to buy Ethereum Classic(ETC) Guide

What is Ethereum Classic (ETC)?

A major exploitation happened on the Ethereum blockchain in 2016, resulting in a loss of 3.6 million ETH, which amounted to roughly USD 60 million that year and might cost billions of USD today. The hack caused massive repercussions in the whole crypto industry: investors were panicked and sold off, while crypto-critics were putting blockchain on full blast and Ethereum developers were scurrying to find a way to solve the problem since they had only 28 days before the hackers could completely cash out the 5% total supply of ETH in circulation that were stolen.

Then came a solution: reverting the Ethereum blockchain to before the hack happened, so that those who were affected by the exploit got to keep their money and everything went on as if the unfortunate event had never happened. The solution was approved by the majority of voter-miners and was endorsed by Vitalik Buterin, the creator of the chain. Therefore, Ethereum was reversed and the hack did not exist on the new hard fork, which has then become the main Ethereum, while the original chain that still contains the theft has then been called Ethereum Classic.

Ethereum Classic, despite being less popular than its brother, is supported by many who have the mentality “Code is King” and think that the immutability of blockchain needs to be maintained at all costs. Ethereum Classic supporters consider the reverse of the exploit goes against what blockchain stands for and compromises the quintessential security of the technology. Security is also the very reason why they choose to stick with PoW after Ethereum moves to PoS. On the Ethereum Classic website, the developers claim that PoW is more secure because they have a 50% fault tolerance while it takes only a 33% fault tolerance to influence a PoS network. That being said, Ethereum Classic suffered multiple 51% attacks in 2019 and 2020.

How Ethereum Classic (ETC) Works

Ethereum Classic and Ethereum are technically identical until block number 1,920,000, which is the block where the theft was recorded. As Ethereum transitions from PoW to PoS, Ethereum Classics, originally, was planned to support PoS like Ethereum too. But after a few updates and debates, the developers of Ethereum Classic decided to stay with PoW, compromising speed and scalability for security. The team admits that Ethereum Classic is “conservatively run”, committed to the purist’s ideas of blockchain. Though the majority of Ethereum Classic is similar to Ethereum pre-Merge, the significant differences are:

- Prioritization of integrity and security over speed and scalability

- Full replication of data rather than fragmentation of data in Ethereum

- The token of Ethereum Classic, ETC, having a hard cap, unlike Ethereum’s ETH, to ensure property rights of holders

The PoW consensus mechanism that Ethereum Classic adopts is criticized by many to consume too much energy and be too slow to process daily transactions. Yet, the supporters rebuke with the claim that PoW enables the network to be much safer, and therefore, it is ideal to be used as a layer 1 to process bulks of transactions and Ethereum can be used as a layer 2 to group together transactions to send to Ethereum Classic.

How Many ETC Tokens Are There in Circulation?

Different from ETH which does not have a predetermined total supply, ETC has a total supply of 210,700,000. The hard cap of ETC was voted on 5 months after its launch. At the moment, the circulating supply of ETC is 137,012,968.83.

ETC block rewards for miners decrease over time. Since April 2022, the reward for mining one Ethereum Classic block is 2.56 ETC.

How to Buy Ethereum Classic (ETC)

Consider investing in Ethereum Classic (ETC)? It only takes 2 minutes to create an account on Bitget and start trading ETC.

Check out the available ETC trading pairs on Bitget!

Futures market

ETCUSDT

Spot market

ETCUSDT

ETCBTC

Ethereum Classic Resources

Whitepaper

Official Website