THE CANONICAL WETC INITIATIVE

Network	Chain ID	Consensus Mechanism	Contract Address	Tx Hash
Mainnet: Ethereum Classic	61	Proof of Work	0x1953cab0E5bFa6D4a9BaD6E05fD46C1CC6527a5a	0x9bb...2259e
Testnet: Mordor	63	Proof of Work	0x1953cab0E5bFa6D4a9BaD6E05fD46C1CC6527a5a	0x895...a212d

WHAT IS WETC?

Put plainly, WETC is "wrapped ETC" but let's start by introducing the players.

FIRST, THERE'S THE ETHER TOKEN

Ether or ETC is the native currency built on the Ethereum Classic blockchain, the original Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) launched in 2015.

SECOND, THERE ARE ALT TOKENS

When a Dapp (decentralized app) is built on top of the Ethereum Classic blockchain it usually implements its own form of token. Real world assets may be pegged 1:1 to a token on Ethereum Classic like US Dollars to the Classic USD stablecoin.

FINALLY THE ERC-20 STANDARD

ERC-20 is a standard developed after the release of ETC that defines how tokens are transferred and how to keep a consistent record of those transfers among tokens on the Ethereum Classic network.

WHY YOU NEED WETC

ETC DOESN’T CONFORM TO THE ERC-20 STANDARD

As mentioned above, ETC was the proto-token of the Ethereum Classic Alt tokens, which means it was built before the ERC-20 standard existed.

WRAPPING ETC ALLOWS YOU TO TRADE DIRECTLY WITH ALT TOKENS

The reason you need WETC is to be able to trade ETC for other ERC-20 tokens on decentralized protocols like ETCswap V3. Because decentralized platforms running on Ethereum Classic use smart contracts to facilitate trades directly between users, every user needs to have the same standardized format for every token they trade. This ensures tokens don’t get lost in translation.

READY TO WRAP?

SO THIS IS AWKWARD...YOU DON'T ACTUALLY WRAP ANYTHING

When you "wrap" ETC, you aren't really wrapping so much as trading via a non-custodial smart contract for an equal token called WETC. If you want to get plain ETC back you need to "unwrap" it, or trade WETC back for plain ETC. You can easily wrap/unwrap ETC through any of ETCswap's user interfaces. Bookmark this censorship-resistant IPFS gateway which is always available through the distributed web.

BUILDING ONE UNIFIED WETC TOKEN

Notable Projects
Classic USD
ETCswap V2
ETCswap V3
More to come...

BlockScout | CoinGecko | CoinMarketCap | TradingView

The greater EVM stands on the shoulders of giants. Inspired by the WETH.io project. Thank you to Nikolai Mushegian and the DappHub participants.

Note: WETC Contract was updated by Gnosis to Solidity 0.5+ best practices. Why?

In a recent release (v0.4.21 at 8th March 2018), `emit` keyword has been introduced to emit the event. This will help to differentiate the functions from event which was one of the reason of TheDAO Hack which led to hard fork in Ethereum & gave birth to Ethereum Classic.