Ethereum Classic

On 2016-07-20, Ethereum's recovery fork moved roughly 12 million ETH from Dark DAO and Whitehat DAO contracts into a withdrawal contract. Some miners and users continued the state without that intervention. The two networks shared every earlier block, then assigned different meaning to the same crisis.

The duplication was practical as well as philosophical. Anyone holding ether before block 1,920,000 now had assets on both branches, and the same signed transaction could initially travel across them. On 2016-07-26, the Ethereum Foundation advised ETC users to split balances into separate wallets; Die Hard finally gave ETC chain ID 61 replay protection on 2017-01-13.

In January 2019, Coinbase detected deep reorganizations and later counted 12 double-spend reorganizations totaling 219,500 ETC. On 2020-07-31 and 2020-08-05, two more majority-hash attacks produced about 800,000 ETC and 460,000 ETC in reported double spends. The first also exposed a client fault line: pruned Parity nodes rejected the deep replacement while other nodes accepted it. Coinbase labels these incident dates and times as PST in its report. The winning replacement chain had fewer blocks but higher cumulative difficulty, so block count alone did not determine the accepted history.

ETC's response layered defenses rather than erasing the proof-of-work premise. MESS made Core-Geth temporarily resistant to late competing histories. Thanos then activated ETCHash at block 11,700,000 by doubling the DAG epoch so more lower-memory GPUs could mine. When Ethereum left proof of work and compatible hashpower conditions changed, Spiral deactivated MESS by default in 2024.

ECIP-1017 replaced open-ended reward continuity with 5M20 eras. At each five-million-block boundary, the block reward falls by 20%. The often quoted 210.7 million ETC ceiling is the proposal's approximate theoretical upper bound under assumptions that include maximum uncle issuance, not a precise statement of circulating supply.

There is no native ETC token contract with an owner function for minting or freezing balances. Miners receive protocol issuance, and nodes enforce the schedule they run. That removes a privileged mint key, but not governance: changing the schedule still depends on developers publishing code and miners, node operators, exchanges, wallets and users deciding which client rules to follow.

The live network still identifies as EVM proof of work, ETCHash and chain ID 61. Its activated upgrade history reaches Spiral at block 19,250,000, while Core-Geth v1.12.23 shipped on 2026-08-14 as a maintenance release with no ETC consensus changes. Those are observable protocol facts; ecosystem roadmaps are separate claims.

ECIP status is therefore part of the product boundary. A draft governance or treasury design can describe a possible future without controlling today's chain. ETC's original refusal to rewrite one application remains its founding distinction, but daily finality now depends on a less dramatic discipline: enough independent hashpower, compatible clients, cautious confirmations and users who know which chain they are signing for.