If you'd like to send and receive ETC, use one of the applications deployed to Ethereum Classic, or are worried about how to use it safely, this page is for you.
Yes, Ethereum Classic operates to the end user in pretty much exactly the same way as Ethereum. You'll just need to make sure the wallet, application, exchange or other service you are using supports Classic.
Ethereum Classic, being technologically very similar to Ethereum, shares a body of work in user guides, tutorials and walkthroughs that apply to both chains, which is why the community guides on Ethereum.org are highly recommended reading.
You can also use MetaMask with Ethereum Classic.
You can easily add Ethereum Classic to MetaMask via the CoinList.org website. If you want to manually configure MetaMask to use a custom Ethereum Classic RPC node, you can check out the MetaMask guide.
A known bug with MetaMask is that it will not recognize ETC created with Ledger Live (and some other hardware wallets). You can workaround this by sending ETC from Ledger Live to the MetaMask wallet you set up using same device.
Step 1: Don't Worry. As long as you sent it to an account that you control or generated, you are likely able to recover your funds.
Depending on the software or exchange you are using, there are various different methods of recovery, so they cannot all be listed here. Search online for "[service name] recover lost ETC". You may have to contact a support agent of the service you are using.
For example, Ledger Wallet
To prevent transactions from being created multiple times, every Ethereum Classic transaction includes a number called a nonce that increments each time you send a transaction.
Sometimes, especially if you send a transaction with a low gas fee, your transaction can get stuck in the mempool. In this case, MetaMask may not set the nonce correctly for subsequent transactions.
You can force MetaMask to use the correct nonce by checking your the nonce of your last successful transaction on BlockScout, increasing it by 1, and setting the nonce manually in MetaMask.
The most popular and fully-featured Ethereum Classic explorer is BlockScout, but there are also several alternatives available in the block explorers section.
There are many different types of wallet available depending on your use case. Check out the wallets section for more information.
Everything from centralized exchanges, DEXs, DeFi, NFTs, cross-chain bridges, and more. Check out the services section to find out more.
Yes. A small, but growing decentralized finance ecosystem exists on Ethereum Classic, see the finance app category for updates.
No, at least not as you would on a Proof of Stake blockchain. ETC is a Proof of Work blockchain, so you can only mine, not stake, to provide security to the network.
There may be some lending protocols that allow you to loan out your ETC for a yield, but these are not part of the Ethereum Classic protocol itself, and come with counter-party risk.
In 2020, Ethereum Classic had a historically very low hashrate, which led to a series of 51% attacks. It is believed that attackers rented out hashrate and targeted exchanges with double spend attacks, who in total lost around $10m in ETC.
In response, Ethereum Classic clients and the wider ecosystem since implemented a number of countermeasures, such as longer confirmation times on exchanges, ECIP-1099, and MESS. Since these countermeasures have been in place, there have been no further 51% attacks.
Moreover, since Ethereum's switch to Proof of Stake in 2022, ETC became the largest GPU-minable chain, increasing it's hash rate by 50x to 100x since the last 51% attack. This has made it exceedingly unlikely that a pool of hashrate is available to rent out to perform another 51% attack, and even if it was, would prohibitively expensive to do so without any guararuntee of success.
As with all Proof of Work blockchains, the potential for 51% attacks to occur is a necessary part of the protocol's design. As time goes on and Ethereum Classic continues to no longer be attacked in this way, stakeholders can be increasingly confident that 51% attacks are a thing of a past.
In any case, it does not make financial sense for 51% attackers to target small holders, and they aren't able to "steal" your ETC. Rather, they typically target exchanges by double-spending withdrawals. Historically, exchanges have been able to absorb these relatively small-scale attacks, and have implement countermeasures as described.
As mentioned in the above question, as a countermeasure to 51% attacks, some exchanges have extremely long deposit times for Ethereum Classic. This helps defend the exchange from being a victims of a double spend attack, but means users need to wait more time for deposits to be confirmed.
As the hashrate of ETC has recently increased significantly, it is likely that exchanges will reduce the number of confirmations required to completed deposits.
A blockchain is a special type of distributed database. The most significant attribute of blockchains is that no one controls them! There is no one everybody needs to trust to manage it. That is why they are referred to as being trustless. Users submit tasks in transactions that are grouped into blocks that are linked together to form chains.
Ether is Ethereum Classic's native token is a cryptocurrency traded on digital currency exchanges under the ticker symbol ETC. Ether is created as a reward to network nodes for a process known as mining, which validates computations performed on Ethereum Classic's EVM.
Ether and ETC denote the native cryptocurrency used to pay for tasks such as installing new smart contracts. What is Ether and Ethereum?
Gas is internal transaction pricing mechanism, is used to mitigate spam and allocate resources on the network. It is a unit used to denote the amount of resources required to do tasks such as installing new smart contracts.
