Ethereum Classic: What you need to know
Ethereum Classic, with the ticker (ETC), was founded by Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood. It was initially released on July 30, 2015, as the original Ethereum and still maintains the unaltered history of the Ethereum network.
It is a decentralized open-source, blockchain-based that supports a modified version of Satoshi Nakomoto's (BTC) consensus(PoW- Proof of Work) via transaction-based state transitions executed on a public Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with just one key difference: the ability to be used as a distributed computer to run self-executing smart contracts.
The ability to run self-executing smart contracts made it distinct and a couple of projects and developers made good use of it, until 2016 when a project called The DAO was hacked.
A german startup named Slock.it launched a project on Ethereum Classic (which was Ethereum then) called The DAO on April 30, 2016, and had raised over $150 million from over 11,000 investors within three weeks of the token sale making it one of the largest crowdfunding campaigns in history at the time. However, this feat was quickly shortlived when an attacker discovered there was a bug that made the smart contract vulnerable and began siphoning funds from The DAO stealing over $50 million.
Without further ado, a lot of Ethereum users including the founders supported a soft fork in the blockchain's base protocol or a hard fork. This resulted in the formation of the new Ethereum chain.
However a section of the community remained opposed to the fork and chose instead to stand by the principle of "Code is Law", and as such the old chain remained and was renamed Ethereum Classic, while the new one which is an offset of the original chain became the Ethereum (ETH) that now exists.
Ever since the split of the chain happened due to the hack, a lot of crypto analysts and researchers have labeled ETC as a "dead project" that will never develop or outgrow Ethereum, however, there has been continuity of updates on the ETC chain over the years, and a couple of projects have found the chain very useful still in building their products.
Credit source(s):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic
https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao
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