According to the latest data from the official website, there are only a few months left before Ethereum switches to the proof-of-stake protocol. The date of the merger of the two branches is the second quarter of 2022, and all the intermediate stages have already been passed. This is a major event for the market, which directly affects the second largest cryptocurrency with a capitalization of $ 356 billion.
The main change is the rejection of mining. Instead of miners, validators will be responsible for confirming transactions (the principle of proof of ownership). The need for expensive calculations will disappear, miners will be left without income. This will encourage them to reorient for block mining in other networks, and Ethereum Classic (ETC) is the first in the list of alternatives.
ETC appeared as a result of the Ethereum hard fork on block 1,920,000 in July 2016
The hard fork was the response of Vitalik Buterin and most developers to the hacking of the DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) and the theft of 3.6 million ETH. With the help of a hard fork, Buterin decided to rewrite history in order to return money to DAO investors. But not everyone supported this idea, calling for keeping the code unchanged. The old branch was named Ethereum Classic, and the basic principle of the community was the doctrine “code is law”.
Both blockchains support smart contracts, but at the same time ETC has a number of differences from ETH, for example, the complexity bomb is deactivated, and the issue of coins is limited to 210 million. The developers supporting ETC described the basic principles of the system: transactions and registry history cannot be changed, and changes will not be made to the code that can lead to a violation of the properties of immutability and interchangeability.
ETC and ETH work on the same algorithm, and the daily yield of the old branch is not much inferior to the leading altcoin — $2.15 versus $2.43 with an equipment capacity of 84 MH/s (RTX 3080). When switching ETH to PoS, first of all, miners will switch to mining ETC. The renewed talk about the impending move has led to an increase in ETC by 80% over the past 8 days.
For ETC, the influx of miners will provide invaluable support, since the network has previously faced a 51% attack several times. The increase in hashrate and the growth of decentralization will favorably affect the security of the network and create conditions for further growth of the coin.
