Can ETC take on Ethereum's ecosystem after Merging

Colin Wu

Jul 18, 2022

Due to the recent merge news of Ethereum, ETC（ Ethereum Classic）has started to soar, rising 40% in 7 days and 17% in 24 hours. The reason for the rise is largely due to the belief that ETC can take over the hash rate power, some users and even the ecosystem of the Ethereum. The author of this article summed up the following after communicating with several ETC ecologists.

ETC was supported and promoted by DFG and DCG in China and the US respectively in the past, but in the end, it did not succeed and even created some conflicts. Whether DCG will continue to support ETC after the merger is unknown, and DCG has to solve the big problems about Grayscale, Genesis and other organizations, so there is no trace of support for ETC yet.
The ETC developer team is very fragmented, without a spiritual leader like Vitalik and a centralized force, so pushing things forward is relatively slow and inefficient. At present, there are almost no mature projects of Ethereum to deploy in ETC ecosystem. If a mature protocol enters the market later, it is an important part and can drive the participation of other projects.
Large miners and mining machine manufacturers are currently the most active in promoting the power of the ETC ecosystem, with nearly $5 billion of mining machine equipment rumored to be idle after the Ethereum merger. However, unlike DApp, miners do not have the ability to build a blockchain ecosystem. There is also the problem that the current hash rate of any of the head miners entering ETC could immediately create the risk of a 51% attack. Therefore, there is a possibility that miners will launch their own fork chains similar to Filecoin’s main network after the launch. However, due to the low ability of miners to build ecosystem, the probability of success is not high.

In summary: miners are the most promising force to participate in ETC ecological construction. They have capital, but no experience and ability to build blockchain ecosystem, more likely to fork their own controllable POW ETH. The ETC developers are relatively decentralized, so it is difficult to organize and coordinate all parties efficiently and actively. However, ETC is still the best place to take ETH’s hash rate power/users/community/funds, and whether the mature DApps on Ethereum ecosystem and the motivated organizers like SBF will enter is the key. It is worth keeping an eye on.

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