Ehereum (ETH) has successfully hard forked a few days ago and moved on a new chain, however this also brought to life Ethereum Classic (ETC) that continue to run on the old blockchain without any modifications that were made by the forking Ehereum (ETH). Initially the support for Ethereum Classic was a bit questionable, but after Poloniex – the current largest Ethereum (ETH) exchange added a market for trading ETC as well things started turning. There are already a few exchanges trading ETC with more probably soon to follow, multiple services such as block explorers and quite a few mining pools already available. The current value of 1 ETC is about 1/20th that of 1 ETH, but the daily volume traded on Poloniex shows that the Ethereum Classic has almost half the volume of Ethereum.
The most important question that people probably have at the moment is how they can get a hold of their ETC coins based on the ETH they are holding. There are some good and some bad news here, if you were running a local wallet then the ETH coins you had in it prior the hard fork will also give you the ability to have the same amount of ETC coins. What you will have to do is to run a copy of the blockchain prior the hard fork at block 1920000 and run a pre-hardfork client such as geth earlier than version 1.4.10. Of course for the ETH coins you would still need to run the original blockchain with a client supporting the hardfork (make sure you use different directories for storing the two chains). If you had all of your ETH coins in an exchange or an online wallet, then you might be out of luck unless that wallet or exchange provides support for ETC as well. In the case of Poloniex any ETH that you help in the exchange resulted in you getting the same amount of ETC, however still only a few exchanges do provide support for ETC.
At this point it is quite hard to say what is the actual amount of ETC coins that can be operated by their owners and unfortunately there is the chance that some exchanges that do not officially add support for ETC can still get a hold of the ETC coins that were available as ETH balances prior to the hard fork. So at the moment it is still hard to predict what exactly will happen with Ethereum Classic, all we can say is that we are seeing peak in user interest and support, but will that be enough to establish ETC as a long term alternative to ETH or not is still hard to say. So you might want to keep an eye out for ETC and if you can get a hold of your Ethereum Classic coins you should do so just in case. As for those of you that may decide to mine ETC (it is on a separate chain after the hard fork) you should know that there is still a quite a bit of risk involved and ETC future is still a bit uncertain. We are going to be keeping a track of how things with Ethereum Classic progress further on and keep you updated on how the situation evolves.
For more information about the Ethereum Classic (ETC) visit the official website…