Buy Ethereum Classic

Ethereum Classic is the original Ethereum blockchain. Not a copy of it, not a fork away from it: the chain that kept running when most of the community moved to a different one in 2016. ETC is its native cryptocurrency.

That sentence is the whole asset. Everything else about Ethereum Classic follows from a decision made in the first weeks of Ethereum's life, and from the choice to keep living with the consequences. Our guide to Ethereum covers the network it separated from, and our guide to blockchain covers the basics underneath both.

Where did Ethereum Classic come from?

In April 2016 a project called The DAO launched on the year old Ethereum network. It was an investment fund run by code: people sent in ether, holders voted on what to fund, and the contract executed the outcome. It raised an enormous amount for the time and held a meaningful share of all the ether then in existence.

In June 2016 an attacker exploited a flaw in The DAO's code and drained roughly a third of the ether it held. The code did what it was written to do. It was simply written badly.

That created a question the Ethereum community had never had to answer. The stolen funds were locked in a holding period for several weeks, which left time to argue about it, and the argument was not really about the money. It was about whether a blockchain's history can be changed when enough people want it changed.

In July 2016, at block 1,920,000, most of the network adopted a change that moved the drained funds into a contract from which the original contributors could reclaim them. It rewrote the ledger to make the theft not have happened. That chain kept the Ethereum name and the ETH ticker and is what people mean today when they say Ethereum. CoinDesk's retrospective is a good account of how the decision was made.

A minority refused, and kept mining the chain that still recorded the theft. That chain is Ethereum Classic. It is the older of the two in the sense that matters: it has never had its history altered.

What does "code is law" actually mean?

It is the principle Ethereum Classic exists to defend, and it is more demanding than it sounds.

The claim is that the output of a smart contract is final because it is the output of the contract, regardless of whether anyone intended it, deserved it, or thinks it fair. A blockchain that will reverse a transaction under sufficient pressure is not a neutral settlement system. It is a system with a discretionary override, and the existence of the override is the problem, not how rarely it is used.

The honest counterargument is the one Ethereum made: a network is a community of people, not only software, and refusing to act while a large share of your users are robbed is a choice with its own consequences. Both positions are coherent. Ethereum Classic is a bet on the first one, and buying ETC is partly a bet that a market eventually pays for credible neutrality.

How does Ethereum Classic work today?

It is proof of work. Miners compete to add blocks using computing power, the model Bitcoin uses and the model Ethereum abandoned in 2022. Ethereum Classic is now the largest smart contract network still secured this way. It uses Etchash, not Ethash. In late 2020, after a run of attacks, the network changed its mining algorithm so that mining power built for Ethereum could not be pointed at Ethereum Classic at a moment's notice. It also kept older hardware viable. It runs the same kind of smart contracts as Ethereum. ETC is fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and periodically adopts Ethereum's upgrades to stay in step, most recently through the Spiral upgrade in February 2024. It has no fee burn. Ethereum Classic deliberately did not adopt the fee mechanism that destroys part of every Ethereum transaction fee. Fees go to miners. It has no staking. There is no way to stake ETC and no protocol rewards for holding it. Its security comes from mining, not from bonded capital.

What is ETC's supply?

This is the part of Ethereum Classic that most resembles Bitcoin and least resembles Ethereum.

Ethereum Classic adopted a fixed monetary policy in December 2017, known as 5M20 and specified in ECIP-1017. The total supply is capped at approximately 210.7 million ETC, and the reward paid to miners falls by twenty per cent every five million blocks, roughly every two and a half years. The community calls each of these reductions a fifthening.

Ethereum, by contrast, has no supply cap. That difference is genuinely one of the clearest arguments for holding ETC rather than ETH, and it is worth weighing against everything in the risks section below rather than on its own.

What happened after Ethereum moved to proof of stake?

In September 2022 Ethereum stopped using mining entirely. Overnight, an enormous amount of specialised mining hardware had nowhere profitable to go, and a large share of it moved to Ethereum Classic, which used a compatible algorithm and was the biggest remaining option.

That transformed ETC's security position. A network that had been attacked repeatedly because it was cheap to attack became substantially more expensive to attack. It also created a dependency worth understanding: Ethereum Classic's security is now tied to the economics of mining hardware that exists largely because Ethereum once needed it.

The 51% attacks

Any honest page about ETC has to cover this, because it is the most serious thing that has happened to the network.

In January 2019 Ethereum Classic was hit by a reorganisation attack that enabled a double spend of roughly a million dollars' worth of ETC. In August 2020 it happened three times in a single month, with attacks reorganising thousands of blocks and double spending several million dollars in total, largely against exchanges. The attacks worked because renting enough computing power to out mine the network was cheap relative to what could be stolen.

The response was a defensive measure called MESS, which made nodes reluctant to accept a competing version of history that appeared suddenly. It was deactivated in early 2024, on the argument that the hashrate the network gained after Ethereum's move to proof of stake had made it unnecessary.

There have been no further successful attacks since 2020. That is a real improvement and it is not a guarantee. A smaller proof of work network is structurally easier to attack than a larger one, and Ethereum Classic's security budget remains far below Bitcoin's. This is why exchanges typically require more confirmations for ETC deposits than for other assets.

What is Olympia?

Ethereum Classic has never had a way to fund its own development. It has no protocol treasury, and work has depended on donations, companies and grants, which has repeatedly left it short.

Olympia is a set of proposals, published in 2025 and still in draft, that would change this. It would introduce a version of Ethereum's fee mechanism, but instead of destroying the base fee it would route it to an on chain treasury, alongside a governance framework for spending it. Targets have been discussed for testnet and mainnet, but nothing has been activated and the proposals remain open for comment on the network's improvement proposal process.

It is worth watching for two reasons. It would be the most significant change to ETC's economics since 2017, and a treasury funded by transaction fees is exactly the kind of governance mechanism that a network founded on minimal discretion has historically been suspicious of. It is not settled.

Who builds Ethereum Classic?

There is no company. Protocol changes go through an open improvement proposal process, and anyone can submit one. Core-Geth is the main client software, maintained with support from the ETC Cooperative, a non profit that has been the most consistent funder of the network's development.

The list of organisations that have come and gone is longer than the list that remain. An early development company shut down in 2018 for lack of funding. Input Output, which had committed engineers and built an alternative client, withdrew after the community rejected its proposal for an in protocol treasury, and its client is no longer meaningfully developed. Compared with Ethereum, development is thin, and it has been thin for a long time. That is the honest position, and Olympia is the community's attempt to fix the cause of it.

What are the risks of holding ETC?

A demonstrated history of successful attacks. Ethereum Classic has been 51 per cent attacked and double spent more than once. Its position is much stronger than it was, but the vulnerability is structural to a smaller proof of work chain rather than something that was patched. Security depends on mining economics. If mining ETC stops being profitable, hashrate leaves and the network gets easier to attack. Falling block rewards under the fifthening schedule pull in the same direction over time. Mining concentration. Mining is coordinated through a small number of pools, and computing power can be rented. Concentration is a live risk rather than a theoretical one. Thin development and no funding mechanism. Fewer developers, fewer clients and no protocol income. The proposed fix has not been adopted. Very little runs on it. Despite being a smart contract platform, Ethereum Classic has almost no meaningful application ecosystem. Its case rests on what it is rather than on what is built on it. The comparison problem. Every argument for ETC has to survive the question of why not simply hold ETH, which has vastly more security, developers, applications and liquidity. The answers, immutability and a fixed supply, are real but narrow. No yield and no burn. ETC pays nothing to holders and destroys nothing. There is no mechanism connecting network usage to the token beyond demand for block space. Narrative dependence. ETC's identity, tooling and much of its attention are tied to Ethereum. It tends to move with Ethereum's news rather than its own. Address confusion. ETC and Ethereum use identical address formats, which makes sending to the wrong network unusually easy. Volatility. ETC is not a stablecoin. Its value moves sharply and can fall a very long way and stay there. No government compensation. Digital assets are not covered by the Australian Government's Financial Claims Scheme. If you lose value, there is no compensation scheme to fall back on.

Buying ETC with Australian dollars on CoinJar

CoinJar has operated since 2013 and lists ETC against Australian dollars, so you can buy, sell and hold it without converting through another cryptocurrency first. Current charges are on our fees page, and live Australian dollar rates are on our cryptocurrency prices page.

CoinJar Australia Pty Ltd is registered with AUSTRAC as a digital currency exchange provider, Registration No. DCE100749118-001.

How is ETC taxed in Australia?

The ATO generally treats ETC as a capital gains tax asset. A CGT event can occur when you sell it for Australian dollars, exchange it for another cryptoasset, spend it or give it away.

The ATO explains these rules on its official guidance page. Our guide to crypto tax in Australia provides a practical overview. This is general information, not tax advice. Consider speaking to a registered tax agent about your circumstances.