The decision to hard fork the Ethereum network last week in order to fix security issues and refund the ether lost from the raid on Ethereum Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) has split the community, with a number of miners and exchanges now backing an alternative ether currency.

Called Ethereum Classic, the platform uses the original Ethereum blockchain pre-hard fork complete with all those who held ether on it still retaining their rights, be it without the funds stolen from investors in the DAO raid.

While initially Ethereum Classic did not have much in the way of support, things are changing, particularly following an announcement by ether exchange Poloniex that they would support the Ethereum Classic currency, which goes by the code of ETC. Support for Ethereum Classic has so quickly grown that, according to Cointelegraph, ETC is now the third most traded cryptocurrency online behind bitcoin and the hard forked version of ether itself (ETH).

As of Sunday ETC is worth $76 million and ETC exchanges recorded $14.1 million in trading within 24 hours; the price currently sits at just below $1 per ETC.

Faith

The problem with any currency, online or physical, is that the value of the currency relies on the faith of the people who use it; long gone are the days where currencies are tied to the value of gold.

Hence Ethereum Classic has the same problem, and they are aware of it, writing:

“ The most important question for traders is ‘will ETC have market price’? There are many reasons to believe that it will. Essentially, ETC is an Ethereum ‘spinoff coin’ with a wide user base of all current ETH users. Some of them will see the value of transacting on a censorship-resistant chain, some won’t. This creates interesting arbitrage opportunities for smart traders. Additional reasoning why EHTC is very unlikely to be ‘worthless’.”

Given the numbers so far, ETC would appear to be heading in the right direction and if additional exchanges and miners come online and support ETC it will only continue to grow; that it might overtake ETH one day is far too early to tell, but given that the decision to hard fork Ethereum in the first place was deemed controversial it’s not beyond the realms of possibility.

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