Ethereum Classic – A Sleeping Giant

Ethereum Classic (ETC), a fork of Ethereum (ETH), has been overlooked for a long time since most eyes were focused on the main Ethereum blockchain. However, this might come to an end quite soon as the number of ETH transactions are rising sharply and the network is starting to have difficulties to process them. As a result, the transaction fees are already spiking over $1. If this trend continues, the Ethereum network might reach a critical point before ‘Plasma’, a new technology that should massively increase the network throughput, is implemented.

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Since Ethereum Classic provides the same functionality, it is very easy to switch from ETH to ETC if such an overload happens. This would lead to a huge transfer of capital from Ethereum to Ethereum Classic. Here we can take a look at Bitcoin Cash (BCH) as an analogous example. Since Bitcoin failed to implement the SegWit2x hard fork, hundreds of thousands of unconfirmed transactions started to accumulate in the network and transaction fees jumped to tens of dollars. This made Bitcoin Cash with 8MB blocks to be seen as a viable alternative with the same functionality, but much faster and with lower fees. As a result, its price peaked in November 2017 to more than 0.4 BTC in the BTC/BCH market. At the time of writing, the BCH price is around 0.16 BTC.

Although the analogy between ETC and BCH is clear, Ethereum Classic seems to be somehow forgotten and the exchange rate on the ETC / ETH market is as low as 0.032 ETH / ETC at the time of writing. Compared to BCH vs. BTC, the ratio is about 5 times lower.

Predicting something in the crypto world is always uncertain. But if Ethereum starts having problems with the transaction capacity, which is quite likely to happen in the following weeks, there are high odds that Ethereum Classic will gain big profits out of ETH problems.