The Ethereum Classic explorer, and the forks that kept mining

Type Ethereum Classic explorer into a search bar and you will land somewhere unfamiliar if you only know mainnet Ethereum. Ethereum Classic (ETC) is a separate, independent blockchain: same original codebase, same virtual machine, completely different history since July 2016. It still runs proof of work, it still pays miners a block reward, and it has its own explorer, its own chain ID, and its own small ecosystem of tools that overlaps with mainnet Ethereum's just enough to be confusing.

This guide covers what ETC is and why it exists, which explorers actually work for it today, how its interface differs from the Ethereum explorer you are used to, and what happened to the two newer proof-of-work forks — EthereumPoW and EthereumFair — that appeared when mainnet Ethereum switched to proof of stake in 2022.

Why Ethereum Classic exists: The DAO fork of 2016

In June 2016 an attacker drained roughly 3.6 million ETH — about a third of its supply at the time — out of The DAO, a decentralised venture fund built on early Ethereum. The Ethereum community faced a choice: leave the theft on the record, or rewrite recent history to move the stolen funds into a recovery contract. On 20 July 2016, at block 1,920,000, the network executed a hard fork that did the latter. Most exchanges, wallets and the Ethereum Foundation followed that fork; it kept the ticker ETH and became the chain almost everyone means today by "Ethereum".

A minority of miners and users refused. Their argument was simple: a blockchain's core promise is that transactions, once confirmed, are final — "code is law" — even when the code was exploited. They kept extending the original, un-rewritten chain, and it was later named Ethereum Classic. Both chains share every block and transaction up to 1,920,000; after that they diverge completely, with different balances, different contracts and, eventually, different upgrades.

1. Jun 2016

   The DAO is drained

   An attacker exploits a re-entrancy bug in The DAO, a crowdfunded venture-capital contract, and siphons roughly 3.6 million ETH into a child contract.

2. 20 Jul 2016

   The hard fork

   Block 1,920,000 splits the chain in two. The majority of miners and exchanges move to a new chain that reverses the theft — this becomes Ethereum (ETH). Miners and users who reject rewriting history keep mining the original, unaltered chain — this becomes Ethereum Classic (ETC).

3. 2016–2020

   Replay attacks and 51% attacks

   Early on, transactions valid on one chain were briefly valid on the other too, and ETC survived several 51%-hashrate attacks (2019, 2020) that reorganised thousands of blocks and let attackers double-spend exchange deposits.

4. Nov 2020

   Thanos upgrade (ECIP-1099)

   ETC halves its DAG growth rate and switches from Ethash to Etchash, keeping the chain mineable on consumer GPUs that would otherwise have run out of memory.

5. Sep 2022

   Ethereum moves to proof of stake

   Mainnet Ethereum merges with the Beacon Chain and stops mining. ETC keeps mining, unchanged, and briefly becomes the largest proof-of-work smart-contract chain by hashrate as displaced Ethereum miners point their rigs at it.

Ethereum Classic today: still proof of work, chain ID 61

Nine years on, ETC has not changed its consensus mechanism. It is still mined with Etchash, a memory-hard tweak of the original Ethash algorithm adopted in the 2020 Thanos upgrade (ECIP-1099) to keep older GPUs viable as the mining DAG grew. There is no beacon chain, no validators, no staking. Blocks arrive roughly every 13 seconds and pay a fixed miner reward that decreases gradually under ETC's "monetary policy" rules (ECIP-1017), which cap total issuance — a deliberate contrast with Ethereum's own supply mechanics.

ETC's EVM chain ID is 61 (mainnet Ethereum is 1), which is what your wallet uses to sign transactions for the correct network and, together with the different genesis block, is why an ETC transaction cannot simply be replayed on Ethereum mainnet or vice versa. ETC is still, by most measures, the largest proof-of-work smart-contract platform still operating: it supports the same Solidity contracts, the same ERC-20 and ERC-721 token standards, and the same basic RPC methods as mainnet, which is why tools built for Ethereum — including explorers — can usually be pointed at it with only a chain-ID and RPC-URL change.

Ethereum Classic explorers compared

The main, actively maintained explorer for Ethereum Classic is etc.blockscout.com, run by the same Blockscout project that indexes mainnet Ethereum. It gives you the full set: blocks, transactions, address pages, verified-contract source, a token list and a keyless REST API, and it is the source our own live Ethereum explorer uses when you switch its network selector to Ethereum Classic. As covered in our Blockscout review, the project's licence changed from GPL-3.0 to a source-available licence in April 2026 — worth knowing if you plan to self-host an ETC instance rather than just use the hosted one.

A handful of other tools also cover ETC. Multi-chain explorers such as OKLink and Blockchair-style aggregators list Ethereum Classic alongside dozens of other chains, which is convenient if you already use one of them for other networks — see our Blockchair review for how that style of explorer works. Expedition, the minimal open-source explorer originally built by the ETC Labs core team, still exists as a self-hosted project on GitHub: it runs against any RPC node with no database of its own, which makes it a decent option if you run your own ETC node and want a lightweight local view, in the spirit of the tools in our open-source explorer guide. We could not confirm that a permanently hosted, publicly maintained copy of Expedition is currently online, so treat it as something you self-host rather than a ready-made public site. A few exchanges that list ETC also run their own simplified explorer pages, but these typically only show enough for a customer to confirm a deposit, not general-purpose research.

How an Ethereum Classic blockchain explorer interface differs from mainnet

Open a block on etc.blockscout.com next to the same-looking page on our Ethereum explorer and the layout is instantly familiar — same tabs for transactions, internal transactions, logs, withdrawals-shaped panels — but several fields behave differently, and it is worth knowing why before you assume something is broken.

First, there is no beacon chain data anywhere: no slot number, no epoch, no validator or attestation information, because ETC has no consensus layer separate from block production. Second, ETC has not adopted EIP-1559. Transactions on ETC use the older, single gasPrice field rather than a base fee plus priority tip, so an ETC block page will not show a burnt-fee figure the way a mainnet block does — every gas fee goes to the miner. Third, there are no blob transactions or blob gas fields (EIP-4844 is a mainnet-only, post-Merge feature), and no EIP-7702 "set-code" transaction type either. If you are used to reading mainnet blocks via our beginner's guide to using an explorer, the ETC page will feel like a slightly earlier snapshot of the same interface family.

Address pages carry the same balance, transaction count and token holdings you would expect, and contract verification works the same way, which matters: a good number of ERC-20 tokens and simple DeFi contracts were redeployed on ETC by their original teams or by copycats, so a "verified" badge is exactly as important here as on our smart contract explorer guide for mainnet. One more practical difference: because ETC's ecosystem is smaller, fewer tokens carry the rich name-and-logo metadata that mainnet explorers pull from large curated lists, so you will see more raw contract addresses with no friendly label attached — a good reason to always confirm a token's contract address independently before trusting a symbol shown in a wallet.

EthereumPoW (ETHW): still alive, far smaller than ETC

When mainnet Ethereum switched to proof of stake in September 2022, a separate group of miners forked the pre-Merge chain state to keep a proof-of-work version of "Ethereum" running under the ticker ETHW. Unlike ETC, ETHW does not go back to 2016 — it copied mainnet's full history and state up to the Merge block and then diverged, running its own chain ID (10001) from that point on.

ETHW is still running as of September 2026, with its own dedicated explorer at ethwscan.com and coverage from multi-chain tools such as OKLink's Ethereum PoW explorer, but its market size and on-chain activity are a small fraction of Ethereum Classic's, let alone mainnet Ethereum's. Treat it as a live but niche network: usable, indexed, and mineable, but not a mainstream destination — check current volumes yourself before relying on it for anything beyond curiosity.

EthereumFair (ETHF): what actually happened

EthereumFair launched around the same time as ETHW, from the same post-Merge moment, positioning itself as a "fairer" proof-of-work continuation (it drew attention early on for burning a large pre-mine allocation rather than keeping it). An explorer for it still technically exists, and it was briefly listed on a few exchanges. Beyond that, we could not verify meaningful, current activity: price-tracking sites show its market data stopping updating in early 2026, which is a strong signal of a network that traders and market-data providers have stopped treating as active. If you are holding ETHF from an old fork snapshot, don't assume liquidity or explorer support will still be there when you go to check — verify directly before you plan around it.

Mainnet's own proof-of-work history is still there

It's easy to assume the Merge deleted mainnet Ethereum's mining history, but it didn't — it only changed how new blocks get produced from that point forward. Every block mainnet Ethereum ever produced under proof of work, from the genesis block through block 15,537,393 on 15 September 2022, is still fully queryable on Etherscan, on Blockscout, and on our own live explorer. Block 15,537,394 is the first proof-of-stake block, the one where the "merge" actually happens in the data: open it and you'll see the format change, with a fee recipient tied to a validator rather than a miner, and the difficulty field flatten to a constant.

This matters if you're ever staring at an old mainnet transaction or block reward and wondering why the numbers look different from what you see today — a pre-Merge block shows a miner reward and difficulty; a post-Merge one shows validator withdrawals and, since Dencun, blob-related fields. Nothing was rewritten or pruned; you're just looking at two different eras of the same, single chain.

Replay protection and the danger of sending funds to the wrong chain

Ethereum Classic, mainnet Ethereum, ETHW and even most EVM-compatible chains generate addresses the exact same way: a private key produces the same 42-character address on every one of them. That's convenient for wallet software — one seed phrase, one address, works everywhere — and it's exactly the property that causes expensive mistakes.

Modern wallets and exchanges include EIP-155 chain-ID replay protection in every transaction they sign, which stops a transaction validly signed for one chain from being rebroadcast and accepted on another — ETC's chain ID 61 and mainnet's chain ID 1 make sure of that at the protocol level. That part is solved. The risk that remains is entirely human: if you copy an ETC address into a mainnet ETH withdrawal form, or pick "Ethereum Classic" as the network when you meant to send ETH, the transaction will often still go through — successfully, on the wrong chain — because nothing about the address itself tells the network which chain you intended. The funds land on an address you control on ETC, but if you were sending to a custodial exchange's ETH deposit address, that exchange's ETC-side wallet (if it even has one) is not the address you deposited to, and support teams frequently cannot recover it.

Three habits avoid almost every one of these mistakes. Check the network name shown in your wallet or exchange screen, not just the destination address — they will look identical across chains. When you're unsure whether a deposit landed, search the hash on the explorer for the network you actually used, not the one you intended; our transaction explorer guide walks through reading a receipt end to end. And before moving a meaningful amount to an unfamiliar chain for the first time, send a small test transaction and confirm it on the right address explorer before sending the rest. If you're testing new wallet software or a new dApp integration rather than moving real funds, do that experimentation on a testnet explorer like Sepolia instead of risking it on a live chain such as ETC.

None of this makes Ethereum Classic risky to use on its own terms — it's a functioning, independently secured chain with real miners and real users, and its explorer ecosystem, led by etc.blockscout.com, is perfectly capable for day-to-day lookups. The risk is specifically at the boundary between chains: the moment you're moving value from one network to another and the interface doesn't force you to notice the difference. Our ranking of the best Ethereum explorers and Etherscan alternatives guide cover the mainnet side of that same discipline in more depth.