Navigating the crypto market is a challenging adventure. There are more than 20,000 tokens active at the moment of writing. Every day, this number increases. What’s more, there are numerous forks from popular projects like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
One of the more confusing tokens of this type is certainly the Ethereum Classic blockchain. What exactly is Ethereum Classic, and how did it come to be? Why is it called Ethereum, and should we even compare ETH vs ETC?
We will try to answer these questions in this article by explaining the history of this blockchain as well as its protocol. Moreover, we go over some thorough analyses to provide you with plausible future price predictions for ETC in the medium and long terms.
Ethereum Classic: How Did the Coin Appear?
Ethereum Classic is a direct fork of Ethereum, or more precisely, Ethereum is a fork of Ethereum Classic. This coin appeared in 2016 when the Ethereum network suffered a major hack.
A portion of the developer and mining community of Ethereum wished to revert this hack and erase the blocks that were hacked. They wished to do this by forking from the last block before the hack happened.
However, another faction of the community felt that this went against the principles of the immutability of the Ethereum network and blockchain technology. As such, they chose to continue supporting the genesis Ethereum chain, which became Ethereum Classic.
Over the years both chains have diverged quite significantly on a protocol level from each other. ETC, for instance, isn’t led by a specific team of developers, unlike Ethereum. Ethereum Classic also has chosen to remain on the proof of work consensus, while Ethereum is migrating to proof of stake.
The Problems Developers Aimed at Solving
Ethereum Classic has a limited supply of 210,700,000 ETC, 10x more than Bitcoin. However, this also means that ETC’s limited supply should play in its favor against ETH, which doesn’t have any limits regarding the issuance of tokens.
To provide a controlled supply mechanism, ETC has also adopted a block reward halving similar to Bitcoin, which Ethereum doesn’t have. That said, because of the reduced hash rate of ETC, the chain has suffered numerous 51% attacks over the years.
This might change in September 2022, as the Ethereum miners might migrate towards ETC.
Will the ETH Merge Influence Ethereum Classic’s Price?
As previously mentioned, Ethereum is migrating to a proof of stake algorithm in September 2022. This will render the chain much more scalable, and eco-friendly. In proof of stake, there’s no more need for miners, as validating transactions requires humble hardware.
So what will happen to the miners of Ethereum? Many of the major mining farms have already been selling their mining equipment to buy ETH and have the necessary 32 ETH for running a staking node. However, many have chosen to switch to ETC instead, as this chain still provides some good rentability regarding production costs vs returns. Smart investors are choosing Godex or similar anonymous platforms to exchange their ETH for ETC.
With new miners joining Ethereum Classic’s PoW, the chain will become more secure, and probably draw in more users. Some crypto enthusiasts believe that PoS is not sufficiently decentralized and prefer PoW for blockchain transactions. This means that the price of ETC might rise as there’s more demand for the token, and it becomes more secure through the added hash power.
ETC Price Predictions for 2025-2030
Several crypto analysis websites believe that ETC will soon enter a bullish phase because of the reasons stated above. Currently, ETC is trading at a price of $41, but might experience some considerable growth if we consider the following predictions:
- Digitalcoinprice.com expects ETC to rise to at least $84.51 by the year 2025. After this bullish cycle, the website predicts even higher targets for 2030, $193.28 per token.
- Priceprediction.net has even higher predictions than that. For 2025, they expect the token to rise to $152.94. Following their forecast, Ethereum Classic should reach $906.45 in 2030.
Considering that Ethereum Classic will become the go-to PoW chain for miners that want to support smart contracts, its price should considerably increase in the next years. While many consider PoW to be wasteful, there’s still high demand for it, as it’s the more decentralized option.
Final Note
While Ethereum remains the superior blockchain regarding smart contracts, dev support, and user base, there’s still decent demand for ETC. What’s more, with Ethereum phasing out PoW, ETC might attract PoW enthusiasts and keep growing over the years.
