ETC Inflation Analysis · September 2026 · Supply growing, projected to keep growing
Ethereum Classic has exactly one source of new ETC — the mining subsidy — and that subsidy fell by a fifth inside this window. The Pressure Framework reads ETC at +0.66% over the trailing 90 days and +0.60% over the next 90. Sell pressure is 1.049M ETC of freshly mined coin, buy pressure is 0 because Ethereum Classic has no treasury, no buyback and no fee burn of any kind, and the ECIP-1017 emission schedule steps the block reward down another 20% at every five-millionth block until issuance converges below a worst-case ceiling of 210.7M ETC.
The verdict, in one paragraph
Against a circulating base of 158.126M ETC, the framework books 1.049M ETC of sell pressure and 0of buy pressure over the trailing 90 days — a net of +0.66% — and projects +0.60% for the next 90 days on the post-cut rate. The inflation monitor reads +0.97% for the same window, a gap of 0.31 percentage points, which is inside the framework's 0.5pp tolerance, so the overview page ships with no monitor-gap warning. Almost all of that 0.31pp is the monitor's market-derived supply estimate rather than a real disagreement: its own implied supply for Ethereum Classic swung 622,474 ETC across nine days in June 2026 on a chain that issues about 11,650 ETC a day, so the sampling noise is fifty times the daily signal. The label for ETC is a pure mining chain on a decaying schedule, with nothing on the other side of the ledger: the supply only grows, but it grows less every era, and no mechanism exists to shrink it.
Sell pressure: where new ETC comes from
All of it comes from mining, and nothing else does. ECIP-1017 — the monetary policy Ethereum Classic adopted in 2016 and has not touched since — pays a flat per-block subsidy that drops 20% every 5,000,000 blocks, so the reward is five ETC multiplied by four-fifths for each era elapsed. Era 5 paid 2.048 ETC a block and Era 6 pays 1.6384 ETC. The step between them fired inside this window: block 25,000,000 was mined on Jul 22 2026, and Ethereum Classic's own block accounting reads 2.048 ETC at block 24,999,999 and 1.6384 ETC at block 25,000,000, so the cut is measured rather than inferred from a calendar. That makes the quarter a blend: 259,027 blocks at the old rate and 314,957 at the new one, 573,984 blocks in total, for 1,046,513 ETC of base subsidy.
Uncle blocks add the rest. From Era 2 onward ECIP-1017 pays 1/32 of the era subsidy to the miner of an uncled block and a further 1/32 bonus to the miner who includes it, so every included uncle costs one-sixteenth of a block reward — real issuance that a schedule-only calculation misses. Rather than sample it, the framework swept the uncle count on every one of the 573,984 in-window blocks, and the measured uncle rate of roughly 4.2%adds about 0.26% on top of the base. Two details are worth stating because they change the answer. First, Ethereum Classic ran 13.55 seconds a block against its 13 second target, so the chain was 4.2% slow; the subsidy is indexed to blocks and no protocol constant compensates for the drift, which means a nominal 90-day figure computed at the target would have overstated issuance by 4.2%. Counting actual blocks removes that error. Second, because a documented rate change landed mid-window, the forward column is re-based on the post-change Era 6 rate alone — the next 90 days run entirely at 1.6384 ETC a block, since the next step-down at block 30,000,000 is roughly two years away.
Every other sell row on Ethereum Classic is a measured zero, and that is unusual. Sell #2, vesting unlocks, is 0: ETC carries the original 2015 genesis allocation of about 72M coins, that allocation was spendable from the first block, and the chain has no vesting module, no escrow and no lock contract. No unlock tracker publishes a schedule for ETC because none exists. Sell #3, Foundation and unscheduled unlocks, is 0: Ethereum Classic has no protocol treasury and no developer fund — the subsidy goes to miners and to nobody else, and both historical attempts to create a treasury were withdrawn. Sell #4, long-term locked or bankruptcy, is 0: there is no bankruptcy estate, no trustee and no court-ordered distribution attached to ETC.
Buy pressure: where new ETC goes
Nowhere. All four buy rows read 0, and on Ethereum Classic that is structural rather than a quiet quarter. Buy #1, programmatic buyback, is 0 because there is no money to run one with: the protocol collects nothing, so no pot exists that could be spent repurchasing ETC on the open market. Buy #3, Foundation buy, is 0 for the same reason — no entity draws an income stream from the chain, so there is nothing to credit as demand. Buy #4, new long-term lock, is 0 because Ethereum Classic is a pure proof-of-work chain with no staking, no bonding and no deposit contract; every coin it issues is spendable the moment it is paid.
Buy #2, protocol fee burn, is also 0, and this is the row most worth explaining, because a large amount of commentary asserts the opposite. Ethereum Classic never adopted the base-fee burn its post-merge cousin runs, and the framework proved that on chain rather than asserting it: the block header carries no base-fee field at all, Ethereum Classic's block accounting reports a null base fee and zero burnt fees at blocks spanning both eras, and the head-of-chain block paid its miner 1.638409 ETC — the 1.6384 subsidy plus a fraction of a coin in transaction fees, credited to the miner rather than destroyed. Both keyless addresses were then read with their full balance history so the movements are enumerated rather than inferred: together they received 1.098742 ETCacross the entire 90 days, in two accidental sends on Aug 5 2026. Meanwhile the supply counter rose by the full mining subsidy. Two independent surfaces, both read at both ends, both consistent with zero destruction. The upgrade many readers expect to change this does not burn the base fee either — the leading proposal credits 100% of it to a treasury address and says so verbatim, a competing one splits it 95/5 between miners and a treasury, and a third sends all of it to miners. All three remain drafts with no activation block, and mainnet is now targeted at 2027.
Foundation and overhang
Ethereum Classic has no team-controlled overhang the framework can measure, and the reason is worth being precise about. Rebuilding the supply from account state closes the identity: the chain's total across all accounts less the balances of the keyless addresses — 12,678.17 ETC at the zero address, 1.41 at the dead address and 0.03 at a precompile — lands within 5.1 ETC of the published total supply, which is three blocks of read lag. Between published total supply and classified circulating supply there is a further 441.8 ETC whose composition is opaque, and that is the whole non-circulating bucket: 0.00028% of supply, 2,375 times smaller than a single day of issuance. There is no foundation reserve, no vesting escrow, no protocol treasury and no dev fund held out of the float, which is what structurally earns the seven zero rows.
Three items are still watched, none of them booked. The non-profit that supports Ethereum Classic still exists but has never published a wallet address or a coin count; its last filed accounts show total assets of 1.7M dollars, so even if all of it were ETC that bounds the exposure below 0.14% of supply. A listed investment trust held 10.85M ETC at Jun 30 2026, about 6.9% of supply, and does not redeem shares, so those coins cannot flow back to holders; it shed 135,354 ETC over six months, which is its 2.5%annual management fee taken in coin rather than any investor selling, and it adds nothing to this reading because the trust's coins are already inside the classified float. And the single largest account holds 35.9M ETC, roughly 22.7% of supply, with the next four at 12.6M, 9.5M, 8.3M and 7.1M — none labelled, all behaving like custodial deposit addresses, so they are depositor coins rather than team supply. The trigger sentence applies to all three: if any of these balances falls between refreshes by more than its published mechanism accounts for, that outflow enters Sell #3 at the next refresh.
How ETC compares to other stepped-emission proof-of-work chains
Ethereum Classic belongs to the small family of proof-of-work chains whose issuance decays on a fixed block-height clock with no offsetting removal. Bitcoin is the reference: it halves every 210,000 blocks, a 50% cut roughly every four years. Ethereum Classic takes the opposite trade on the same axis — a smaller cut, 20%, but far more often in wall-clock terms is not the right way to read it either, because five million ETC blocks at thirteen seconds is about 2.1 years. The practical difference is smoothness: a Bitcoin halving is a single violent step that the market prices for months, while an ECIP-1017 era change is a fifth off a number that was already small. Both chains are structurally incapable of a negative reading, because neither destroys anything.
The sharper comparison is to the chain Ethereum Classic split from. Post-merge Ethereum burns its base fee and can print a negative supply change in a busy quarter; Ethereum Classic cannot, because it never adopted that fee market and, as above, none of the proposals on the table would burn anything even if they shipped. That is the single largest mechanism difference between two chains that share a genesis block and an EVM. Against exchange tokens that run quarterly buybacks, the contrast is starker still: those offset issuance with a demand-linked removal that scales with usage, and their readings can go genuinely deflationary. Ethereum Classic has no revenue line at the protocol level at all — every fee it collects is paid straight to a miner — so there is no version of high usage that turns into buy pressure on this page.
Where Ethereum Classic looks better than its peers is the ceiling and the cleanliness. Uncapped continuous-emission L1s run staking-linked issuance in the mid single digits a year with a supply policy that governance can change; ETC runs at about 2.4% a year today, falling with every era, converging below a worst-case 210.7M ETC — and the spec's own lower bound at historic uncle rates is 198.5M, which the measured 4.2% uncle rate is tracking. There is no vesting cliff to trade around, no treasury to be deployed at an awkward moment, and no discretionary release calendar. The supply story is entirely mechanical, which is both the comfort and the limit: it cannot surprise you, and it cannot help you.
What to watch in the next 90 days
First, the block interval, which is now the only variable in the number. Issuance is 1.6384 ETC a block and the block count is set by hashrate, so if marginal miners capitulate after the 20% cut the interval lengthens and the next-90-day reading lands below +0.60%; if hashrate returns it lands above. No post-cut hashrate series was published in a form that quantifies this, so it is genuinely open. Second, Oct 28 2026: a Japanese exchange announced on Sep 4 2026 that it will delist ETC and market-sell whatever remains in customer accounts, converting it to yen — a forced sale of existing float rather than new supply, so it does not enter this ledger, but the size was not disclosed and it is the only dated event on the calendar. Third, the fee-market upgrade: if any of the three competing proposals gets an activation block, it creates a protocol treasury and therefore a futuresell-side row, not a burn — the framework will book it that way. Fourth, the investment trust at 10.85M ETC, whose share count has been flat all year; any move to open redemptions would be a genuine change in what the float means. Fifth, the next era step-down at block 30,000,000, which is about two years out — no claim that another cut lands in 2026 is correct.
Summary
The MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads ETC at +0.66% over the trailing 90 days and +0.60% projected forward: supply growing, projected to keep growing. The mechanism is a single one — the ECIP-1017 mining subsidy, which paid 1.049M ETC across 573,984 blocks and stepped down 20% to 1.6384 ETC at block 25,000,000 on Jul 22 2026 — set against a buy side that is empty by construction: no treasury, no buyback, no staking, and no fee burn, with the keyless addresses taking in 1.098742 ETCin ninety days. The key risk is that nothing on this chain can ever offset issuance, so the reading can only approach zero from above and never cross it. The comfort is that the schedule is fixed in code, needs no vote to keep working, and has now delivered its cut: Ethereum Classic's issuance is the lowest it has been in its history, and the only thing that moves the number from here is how fast miners find blocks.
MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of ETC, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Updated Sep 10 2026.