Alternative Ethereum Blockchain Gains Support as Price Declines

Ethereum Classic went from a protest vehicle to a more serious project this weekend following notable nods of support from major exchanges and community members.

To recover the funds, ethereum developers solicited a community vote early this month, a process that resulted in the decision to "Hard fork" its blockchain last week, or implement a change to the code that would return funds to investors.

This small, but growing contingent of the ethereum community has continued to maintain a blockchain with the alternative account history, one in which a copy of the original funds are still under control of the anonymous person who executed the attack on The DAO. For now, just how serious the support is for the project, or whether it will emerge with a unique value proposition, seems uncertain.

With a trading volume in excess of $10m over the past 24 hours, ethereum classic is just $14m in trade volume behind ether, the native currency for the ethereum blockchain containing the hard fork code.

Though skeptics argue miners on the new branch of the ethereum blockchain should stay calm until the novelty wears off, one early bitcoin adopter has thrown a considerable amount of hashing power into the Ethereum Classic effort.

Today, cryptocurrency mining pool MinerGate added Ethereum Classic support, and BitMEX and ShapeShift.io revealed they should be announcing support soon.

Mining pools Epool.io and ethteam are now mining Ethereum Classic and the largest ethereum exchange by hashing power, F2Pool has said via Twitter it intends to support the currency.

At press time, the total hashing power supporting Ethereum Classic was 173.7 GH/s, or about 2% of the Ethereum network.

Still, the man who launched Ethereum Classic, who goes by the name Arvicco, said he's ready to support the project long enough to potentially convince Boone and other traders to invest.

In conversation with CoinDesk, Arvicco said he's being contacted by developers who have expressed an interest in building on the Ethereum Classic blockchain.