Whenever we usually talk about Ethereum, we are almost always referring to the blockchain that has the ETH token. In fact, Ethereum suffered a hard fork back in July 2016, after a major hack event. An important decision was made, which split the community between two: the ones who agreed and the ones who disagreed. The ones who disagreed stayed on the old blockchain, which is today referred to as Ethereum Classic. In the past week, it was up by more than 300%. Should you buy Ethereum Classic?
What is Ethereum Classic (ETC)?
Back in 2016, the Ethereum blockchain got attacked and suffered its biggest hack. This resulted in the theft of 3.6 million Ethers. After this event, developers decided to “roll back” the blockchain to negate the changes that happened. Other developers were totally against this decision. Why you might ask? Great question.
See, what makes cryptocurrencies and blockchains special, is the fact that they are decentralized. This means that they are autonomous and not prone to any intervention. Those who opposed this reversion went on and created a hard fork of the Ethereum blockchain, which today is known as Ethereum Classic. It holds today as the original chain which was not altered.
Is Ethereum Classic risky?
Ethereum Classic opted to keep everything as is since inception. In fact, despite its proof-of-work mechanism to secure the blockchain, it is still a minority chain. This makes the whole blockchain prone to the 51% attack. In fact, the most recent hack happened back in 2020, when a hacker managed to alter transactions on the chain, making use of a double-spend flaw.
Is Ethereum Classic a good investment?
It is a bit hard to define what a good investment is nowadays. If you’re looking for capital appreciation, you’ll be happy with price surges, such as the one that happened to ETC in the past week. However, if you prefer investing in sustainable and scalable projects that can grow in the long term, you might go for other projects than ETC. In fact, ETH is today the second-largest cryptocurrency, with a market cap of around USD 400 Billion. Even with the recent price surge of more than 300%, ETC has a market cap today of USD 15.9 Billion, twenty-five times less.
With that out of the way, it might be a good idea to wait for a small price correction for ETC. If you didn’t already own this crypto, don’t jump in now yet. A potential retracement should happen soon (fig.1).
- Current price: USD 140
- Circulating Supply: 116,313,300 ETC
- Current market Cap: USD 15.9 Billion
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