Ethereum Classic is an attempt at keeping the Ethereum blockchain unaltered by the part of the community that opposed the hard fork and the return of The DAO funds. It started trading on Poloniex and is getting more and more traction.
The Ethereum Classic mission statement is:
"We believe in decentralized, censorship-resistant, permissionless blockchains. We believe in the original vision of Ethereum as a world computer you can't shut down, running irreversible smart contracts. We believe in a strong separation of concerns, where system forks are only possible in order to correct actual platform bugs, not to bail out failed contracts and special interests. We believe in censorship-resistant platform that can be actually trusted - by anyone."
Our block explorer data: total coins supply, total network hash rate, last block number and total difficulty are freely provided by https://gastracker.io/
In 2017, the Die Hard fork was implemented in ETC, removing the Ethereum difficulty bomb. Currently, there are no plans to move to Proof of Stake like Ethereum, although developers at the IOHK institute are developing a new PoS protocol for Ethereum Classic.
Ethereum Classic has undergone a network upgrade code-named Magneto. Magneto is inclusive of the Ethereum Berlin upgrade which contains a series of EIPs optimizing gas and transactions which have implied security enhancements important for the network.
After a series of 51% attacks on the Ethereum Classic network in 2020, a change to the underlying Ethash mining algorithm was considered by the community to prevent being a minority proof-of-work chain in the Ethash mining algorithm where Ethereum is dominating the hashrate. This modified Ethash is also referred to as EtcHash or Thanos upgrade.
Etchash is a heavyweight PoW algorithm used by Ethereum Classic. It uses the DAG file that is loaded into GPU memory at the moment of miner launch. An epoch change takes place every 60000 blocks and leads to an increase in size of the DAG file by 8 MB.
Try our free Ethereum Classic (ETC) portfolio tracker if you want to efficiently keep track of your ETC and other coin/token investments.