Ethereum classic arguably took its first step on this path when it carried out a hard fork to postpone the so - called difficulty bomb that's built into the ethereum codebase (meant to encourage migration to another consensus mechanism). (coindesk.com)
In this release, ETC developers have removed support for ETH / 61 and introduced ECIP - 1010 also known as the «delay difficulty bomb». (altcointoday.com)
Without a hard fork, Classic would cease to exist due to the mining difficulty bomb. (cryptohustle.com)