ETH Classic Grows 40% Overnight, Sets All-Time High
2 min read
Barely a week after setting its former all-time high of $44.80, ETH Classic has more than trebled in value. At 7 pm yesterday, the coin set an ATH of $157.30.
Though the price has since dipped to $142.18, ETH Classic has bulldozed its way into the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.
At the start of the year, ETC was worth between $5 and $6. The coin has since steadily grown in value, but the bulk of its explosive price movement occurred over the past week.
Today, the coin has a market cap of $17.88 billion. It added $5 billion of that in the last 24 hours alone.
ETH what?
Though it sports a very famous name and logo, ETH Classic shouldn’t be written off as an ETH knockoff. It has a long shared history with ETH. You could even say it’s the original ETH.
In April 2016, the DAO was released on the ETH blockchain. At the time, the DAO was the first of its kind: a Decentralized Autonomous Organisation, essentially an entity on ETH which mimicked the governance of a shareholder-run company.
The DAO did this through the use of smart contracts, or self-enforcing financial contracts—a concept reintroduced to the world through ETH.
In June 2016, however, attackers exploited a flaw in the DAO smart contract that enabled them to abscond with $55 million in ETH.
After the heist, the ETH network held a vote. ETH’s creator, Vitalik Buterin, led a group that proposed to delete these illicit transactions from the blockchain. The group created a new version of the blockchain that edited those transactions out. They continued under the name ETH.
Those in favor of keeping the offending transactions on the blockchain continued under the name ETH Classic.
Though ETH Classic is, technically, the original ETH blockchain, it lags far behind in adoption.
The crypto world, for the most part, hard forked with Buterin and co to support ETH, which now stands as the second biggest cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of $401 billion.
ETH Classic has also had a checkered history when it comes to security. The network fell victim to multiple 51% attacks in the last year, though this has done little to alter its price.
It may get a bad rap for being the “wrong ETH,” but ETC is one of this week’s highest movers.
