Ether Slumps, Ethereum Classic Surges 300%, Finds Support With Exchanges, Miners

Ethereum classic (ETC) has seen a rally in the last 24 hours, in a massive reversal of fortunes.

Ethereum classic is a result of the forking of the Ethereum which, ironically, comes from a decision by the Ethereum foundation to fork Ethereum to try to restore the money lost in the DAO hacking incident earlier on.

In a message released by the promoters of Ethereum Classic they made their intentions clear: they do not accept the fork which was made to reimburse DAO investors.

They say:

“The Ethereum Foundation responded to the DAO debacle in the worst way possible. Special interests controlling the Foundation are ramming through the DAO bailout hardfork against principled opposition of a significant economic minority of Ethereum stakeholders. According to (diligently hidden, pro-fork) the coin vote on Carbonvote, 19% of ETH holders oppose this hardfork. Also, about 22% of Ethereum miners voted against the previous 'DAO softfork' and would logically oppose hardfork as well. Such a significant minority of stakeholders should not be silenced or intimidated into submission - they should be given a clear choice.”

Ethereum Classic sees massive rally

At the time of writing this article at 2:36 PM (GMT) on 26 July 2016, there has been a massive surge in the price and volume of ETC, trading at 0.00362000 BTC (USD 2.37) up 331.36 per cent on the Poloniex exchange. During the day ETC crossed ETH volumes on Poloniex with ETC volumes at 82015.143 BTC and ETH volumes being at 57748.153 BTC. ETH saw its price slump by 5.31 per cent and was trading at 0.01855870 BTC (USD 12.17).

Classic has found support by crypto industry

ETC has found support on some major exchanges like Bitfinex, Poloniex, Kraken. Reddit user SkubaStewart posted that Bitfinex is due to list ETC on Wednesday, 27 July 2016.
A blogpost by MinerGate CMO Janika Kouki encourages users to mine ETC, “This decision was made out of a deep conviction that Ethereum could thrive without manual actions in the first place, as officially stated by our CEO, Claude Lecomte on Cryptocoinsnews.com last week. Having this in mind, MinerGate couldn’t miss the opportunity to encourage the development of the untouched original Ethereum Blockchain.Therefore, we encourage our users to welcome this ‘old new’ cryptocurrency, and consider its mining along with the ‘mainstream’ Ethereum and CryptoNote coins.” This type of support by exchanges and mining operations will certainly give ETC a new breath of life.

Not everyone is convinced of ETC

While ETC seems to have found a lot of backing, the Ethereum community is as split as their cryptocurrency is. We talked with David Seaman a YouTuber/Researcher and a known commentator on Ethereum issues and he says, “I believe in Ethereum. There's a Blockchain that represents Ethereum, one that the miners and user community overwhelmingly have decided to maintain, and that Blockchain is simply not Classic. If the Classic token continues to have economic value in a few weeks, I'll probably sell mine. I understand I have quite a bit given my ETH at the moment of the split. Wish everyone luck :)”

As for what lies ahead of ETC and ETH. Perhaps it’s best expressed in the words of the poet Robert Frost:

“I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

It is you who need to pick the road. Forks are tricky things after all.