Ethereum Classic Hits 4-Month High as Merge Approaches

With anticipation building for the Ethereum merge next month, the price of Ethereum Classic (ETC) hit a four-month high of $42.29 per coin today, an increase of 15 percent in 24 hours, before settling slightly lower for the day, according to CoinMarketCap.

Ethereum Classic is a hard fork of the Ethereum blockchain co-founded by Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood. While both Ethereum forks point to 2015 as their launch, the Ethereum blockchain was rolled back and relaunched in 2016 after the hack of The DAO project, causing a split within the Ethereum community.

Those who did not support the relaunch maintained the original Ethereum blockchain, renamed to Ethereum Classic. Unlike Ethereum, which has no cap on the total number of coins, Ethereum Classic is capped at 210.7 million ETC.

Currently, ETC is the nineteenth largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of $5.6 billion.

While no longer a part of the broader Ethereum network, ETC is seeing a spike in activity thanks to the increased interest in the move from proof of work to proof of stake that Ethereum will soon undertake.

Notably, as the merge draws near, some members of the Ethereum community are again debating whether to execute another hard fork of the Ethereum blockchain to preserve the proof-of-work approach. Leading Chinese cryptocurrency figure Chandler Guo recently suggested the creation of ETHPOW.