Ethereum Classic (ETC)
Ethereum Classic ranks #25 of 484 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #71: 46 of the 70 assets ahead of it are not native coins but tokens or claims. A token is issued on a host blockchain rather than running its own; a claim stands for an asset already counted. Of the 58 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, about 57% are claims on other assets, 36% are tokens and 7% are memecoins.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | A · 74/100 · provisional, A to A+ |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #25 |
| Rank counting claims | #71 |
| Market capitalisation | $1.1B |
| Price | $6.70 |
| Circulating supply | 158,982,304 ETC |
| Maximum supply | 210,700,000 ETC |
| Consensus family | Proof of Work |
| Consensus mechanism | Etchash |
| Own hashrate | 177 TH/s |
| Active addresses a day | 4,159 October 2026 median, Coin Metrics |
| Network purpose | Smart-contract platform |
| Ledger type | Multi-asset ledger |
| Launch distribution | Presale |
Market figures from the 10 November 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
CoinSpectrum Grade (Source)
A — 74 out of 100, provisional (from 10 of 10 sections, 10 November 2026 build). With what is not yet measured anywhere from nothing to full marks, the score would be 71 to 76 (A to A+).
| Section and criteria | Score | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Consensus | 10 | average of 2 criteria |
| By leader (its largest chain's market cap) (Source) | 10 | Proof of work: 10 of 10 on the ladder of consensus families ranked by their largest chain's market cap |
| By family (all its chains' market cap) (Source) | 10 | Proof of work: 10 of 10 on the ladder of families ranked by the combined market cap of their chains |
| Supply | 9.1 | the supply scale times 0.9, and a point for a fixed cap that holds |
| Supply (21 million scores 10) | 9 | fixed maximum supply of 211 million |
| Distribution | 6.5 | average of 4 parts |
| Holder concentration (Source) | – | Not yet measured |
| Active addresses | 4.4 | 4,159 addresses active a day, the median of October 2026's 31 days (Coin Metrics community data) source |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 5.4 | 45.7% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. ETC inherits Ethereum's genesis allocation of 72,009,990.5 coins (about 60M from the 2014 public sale plus about 12M to the developer fund and the Ethereum Foundation), against a circulating/total supply of about 157.7M ETC (CoinGlass and Coinranking, 2026). source |
| Fundraising (share sold) (Source) | 6.2 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 38% of supply sold. Inherited from Ethereum's 2014 crowdsale on the predecessor chain (balances copied 1:1 at the 2016 fork): 60,102,216 ETH sold; ETC itself made no sale. 60.10M / ~158.0M ETC circulating = total (KuCoin/Finary, Aug-Sep 2026) = 38.0%. Ethereum's 2014 public crowdsale (42 days, open to anyone) raised 31,591 BTC (about $18.4M). There were no private or VC rounds. ETC adds no sale of its own. source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 10 | No developer share: every new coin goes to the miners or validators who produce blocks. The whole block reward (ECIP-1017 '5M20' schedule, now 2.048 ETC) goes to miners; there has never been a dev fee. A protocol treasury (ECIP-1098) was proposed and not adopted, and the ETC Cooperative is donation-funded. source |
| Decentralisation | 6.7 | average of 3 parts |
| Governance (Source) | 10 | No authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: No protocol-level party can freeze coins or halt the chain. source |
| No central team (Source) | 0 | A central team directs it: Core-geth, the only maintained ETC client after Besu dropped ETC, is maintained by a small group of developers funded by the ETC Cooperative. source |
| Who can mint (Source) | 10 | Open to anyone with hardware: anyone can produce blocks by mining, no permission needed |
| Nodes (Source) | – | Not yet counted |
| Security | 6.3 | 5 of 8 points source |
| Pool diversity (Largest pool 50% 0 to 20% 10, largest three 90% 0 to 50% 10; 2 points) | 2.5 | largest 41.4%, largest three 81.8% |
| Network activity (Transactions a day, 250 0, 500,000 or more 10; 2 points) | 4.9 | about 10,083 transactions a day |
| Hashrate (Own work 5, its power 1 kW 0 to 10 GW 5; 1 point) | 8.3 | own work 5; about 45.9 MW, 3.3 of 5; the largest on its algorithm |
| Clients (Separate code and teams 10, separate code or teams 9, a fork by the same team or a stale second 8; one client: a new version within 12 months 7, 24 months 6, none in 24 months 5, none in 48 months 3; a second in development +0.5, a second seen running +1, 8 at most with one client; chain ended 0; 1 point) | 7 | one client, latest version Aug 2026 |
| Open source (Node software) | ✓ | |
| No 51% attack (Nor a deep reorganisation, five years) | ✓ | |
| Scalability | 5.3 | average of 5 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 10 | typical fee $0.00035 |
| Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 121, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | 2.7 | about 30 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 4 | a block every 12.6 seconds |
| Block space per 10 minutes (24 MB or more 10: the ten busiest networks' median demand, 16.4 MB, and half again for growth) | 10 | 0.5 MB limit (converted from its gas, compute, mass or count limit), 23.8 MB per 10 minutes |
| Features (3 checks) | 0 | 0 of 3 passed |
| Fast payments (Safe to accept within seconds · Whitepaper abstract, §1, §2 and §11) | ✗ | About 14.6-second probabilistic PoW blocks; safe acceptance needs many confirmations. |
| Pruned nodes (Old history dropped, every rule checked · Whitepaper §7) | ✗ | core-geth --gcmode full prunes old state tries but keeps every block; no block-history expiry. |
| Light clients (Payments verified from headers · Whitepaper §8) | ✗ | No sync-committee or finality-proof light client; PoW header chains without a maintained light protocol. |
| Privacy | 4.7 | 4.7 of 10: whitepaper privacy 4.7 of 7, extra features 0 of 3 source |
| Protocol level privacy (Keys not tied to an identity · Whitepaper §10) | 10 | Any secp256k1 key can hold and send ETC; the chain's account and transfer rules carry no identity check. |
| UTXO ledger (Separate outputs, change to a new address · Whitepaper §2, §9) | 0 | An account ledger: one running balance for each address, so the remainder stays at the sending address and its payments share one public history. |
| HD addresses (A new address for each payment, unlinked · Whitepaper §10) | 10 | BIP32 extended public key (xpub): a watch-only wallet derives each new receiving address without the private key; each address that sends needs its own ETC for fees |
| Hidden amounts (Amounts confidential) | 0 | No confidential transactions. |
| Hidden parties (Sender and receiver hidden) | 0 | No sender or receiver hiding. |
| Network privacy (Origin hidden by default) | 0 | core-geth relays transactions directly; no Dandelion or Tor. |
| Programmability | 8.9 | 8 of 9 points source |
| Token issuance (At protocol level) | 2 | ERC-20 contracts on its EVM, open to any account since the 2016 chain split. |
| Smart contracts (General-purpose) | 2 | The EVM, open to any account, with Ethereum's contract tooling carried over. |
| Multisig and time locks (Without a third party) | ✓ | Multisig and timelock contracts on the EVM. |
| Atomic swaps (With other chains) | ✓ | EVM HTLC contracts (hash lock plus timelock refund). |
| Native DEX (Trades the coin itself, not a claim) | ✓ | Traded as itself, not as a wrapped token or a claim: Komodo DeFi; Bisq. |
| Cross-chain messaging (Verified by the chain itself) | ✗ | No protocol messaging to other chains. |
| NFTs (Carried by the chain's rules) | ✓ | ERC-721 contracts on the EVM. |
| Demand | 7.5 | average of 7 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 47 exchanges |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 6.2 | $10,560,784 traded in 24 hours; #114 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $12,201,223) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 6.3 | 1.0% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (±2% of the price ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 7.6 | $1,966,442 within 2% of the price on 9 exchanges, 0.18% of its market cap, median of the last 15 days |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 7.6 | $1.1B, 7.6 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | 7.6 | futures, options and margin positions 5.7% of its market cap |
| Wallet support (wallets that hold it, 10 or more: 10) | 7 | 7 wallets in the site's wallet directory |
| Record | 9 | average of 3 criteria |
| Age (years since genesis) (Source) | 10 | 11 full years since genesis. Ethereum's original chain, which kept its ledger when the DAO-recovery fork split off at block 1,920,000 on 20 July 2016: its history runs from the genesis block of 30 July 2015. |
| Development (work, fixes, vulnerabilities) | 7 | 2 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 31 commits in 4 of the last 12 months (github.com/etclabscore/core-geth); core-geth v1.12.23 'Argos', released 2026-08-14 (also v1.12.21 and v1.12.22 in March 2026; no release between June 2024 and March 2026). |
| Shipped a security fix in two years, +1 | ✓ | Core-geth v1.12.21, 18 Mar 2026: emergency patch for an active attack on bootnodes; v1.12.22, 28 Mar 2026: CVE-2025-24883, CVE-2026-26315, CVE-2026-26313. |
| Conduct (origin, claims, halts) | 10 | 3 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive record | ||
| Launched with a stated purpose, not as a joke | ✓ | |
| No claims by its founders that contradict its own design | ✓ | |
| No halt, freeze or reversal in five years | ✓ | |
Ten sections, weighted equally, each 0 to 10: consensus (the two ladders), supply (the supply scale and a fixed cap that holds), distribution (premine, fundraising, developer share, holders), decentralisation (governance, no central team, who can mint, nodes), security, scalability, privacy, programmability (what the scripting layer can do beyond the whitepaper's payment system), demand, and record (age, development, conduct). They are built from the criteria in the second table: privacy, scalability, security and decentralisation are the Cryptocurrency Standards among them, as follows: privacy (the whitepaper's three checks a base of 7 of 10, three extra features up to 3 more), scalability (four measures and three features), security (pool diversity, network activity, hashrate, clients and two checks) and decentralisation (governance, no central team, who can mint, nodes, holders, premine, fundraising and developer share); programmability (token issuance, smart contracts and five checks) follows them, and supply and demand are two: the supply, scored against 21 million, and demand, the average of seven measures of the market and the wallets. Provisional: parts marked — are not yet measured and are left out of the average. A rating of structure and market depth, not a price forecast or investment advice. How the grade is built · Highest-graded cryptocurrencies.
Proof of Work coins
Bitcoin BTCA+
Zcash ZECA+
Dogecoin DOGEA+
Bitcoin Cash BCHA++
Litecoin LTCA+
Kaspa KASA+
Dash DASHA+All Proof of Work chains →Proof of Stake coins
Ethereum ETHA+
BNB BNBA
Solana SOLA+
TRON TRXA
Hyperliquid HYPEB
Cardano ADAA
NEAR Protocol NEARAAll Proof of Stake chains →Supply
158,982,304 of a maximum 210,700,000 ETC are in circulation — 75.5% of the total that will ever exist.
Launch and allocation
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 45.7% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 38% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 0% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 0% |
| Fundraising | Public sale |
ETC inherits Ethereum's genesis allocation of 72,009,990.5 coins (about 60M from the 2014 public sale plus about 12M to the developer fund and the Ethereum Foundation), against a circulating/total supply of about 157.7M ETC (CoinGlass and Coinranking, 2026).
Ethereum's 2014 public crowdsale (42 days, open to anyone) raised 31,591 BTC (about $18.4M). There were no private or VC rounds. ETC adds no sale of its own.
Inherited from Ethereum's 2014 crowdsale on the predecessor chain (balances copied 1:1 at the 2016 fork): 60,102,216 ETH sold; ETC itself made no sale. 60.10M / ~158.0M ETC circulating = total (KuCoin/Finary, Aug-Sep 2026) = 38.0%.
The whole block reward (ECIP-1017 '5M20' schedule, now 2.048 ETC) goes to miners; there has never been a dev fee. A protocol treasury (ECIP-1098) was proposed and not adopted, and the ETC Cooperative is donation-funded.
Sources: blog.ethereum.org · kucoin.com · coinranking.com · github.com · github.com · coinranking.com. Researched 2026-10-24, high confidence.
The work behind it
Ethereum Classic is secured by 177 TH/s of its own work. Hashrate does not compare across algorithms — a SHA-256 hash and a Scrypt hash cost different amounts to produce.
What a regulator has said
No SEC/CFTC determination — unclassified.
The regulator's position, reported as stated, not CoinSpectrum's. Assets nobody has ruled on are left unclassified rather than sorted by a guess.
How CoinSpectrum ranks Ethereum Classic
Ethereum Classic is #25 among cryptocurrencies and #71 in the market ranking, which lists wrapped coins, staked derivatives, stablecoins and tokens alongside them. CoinSpectrum counts an asset once, and counts only cryptocurrencies: assets with their own blockchain and their own consensus. A wrapped coin, a staked derivative or a stablecoin is a claim on something already counted; a token, memecoin or otherwise, runs on another chain's blocks. All of them are listed, each in its own section, and none is added to the total. The 46 places between Ethereum Classic's two ranks are held by claims and tokens, not by other networks. The methodology sets out the rule and the counting rule argues for it.
The price above is the median of the exchanges the site reads live, checked every minute and cross-checked against a market snapshot (how market data is gathered). The grade is scored on published criteria, each with its source (the method). The site is independent, nothing on it is a paid placement, and its statements are signed (about CoinSpectrum, the manifesto).