Ethereum Classic Update ~6 months after the Merge.

• Ethereum Classic is now the largest proof of work network in the smart contract sector. Due to this paradigm shift, the mining industry seems to be growing rapidly. Network hashrate is bouncing between 120-130 th/s, up from 20 th/s before the Merge.
  https://2miners.com/etc-network-hashrate
• Many ASIC miners are focusing their marketing efforts on ETC specific miners. Bitmain has allocated $10mm to a public grants program to development on top of Ethereum Classic. It is likely we will continue to see the mining industry adopt Ethereum Classic as their EVM of choice.
  https://etcgrantsdao.io
• It appears there is the early foundations to a Web3 ecosystem forming on Ethereum Classic. This should increase on-chain activity and add functionality to the ETC asset. As adoption happens here, we should see on-chain activity see exponential growth and sell side pressure decrease.
  https://ethereumclassic.com
• Off-chain centralized exchange activity routinely highlights ETC as one of the most active assets for this sector by trading volume.
  https://www.coingecko.com/coins/ethereum-classic

It appears stability has returned to Ethereum Classic with the return of its hashrate. The ETH Foundation appears to not be hostile to ETC now that they have moved to PoS. We will see if the principles of the network result in meaningful adoption during this next bull cycle. There is a lot that needs to be built on ETC, but we are seeing the early signs of material investment from the Proof of Work sector coming into the Ethereum Classic ecosystem.

Expectation: ETC is currently in ETH's 2016-2017 maturity stage. However it has the hindsight of watching the EVM space rapidly grow. I expect it catch up to the 2023 narrative in short fashion. However it is notable that there is a lot of infrastructure missing on top of ETC. So it is not as simple as deploying a dapp. Community building and investment similar to what we witnessed with BSC or other EVMs is required to bring it up to date. But ETC is starting with the great reality that it is adopted in a majority of the blockchain space due to ETH forking away from ETC. Any ETH integration was effectively an ETC integration over the years due to the protocol parity maintained from 2016 to 2022.