ETC is expected to have a hard fork on September 13. Will the skyrocketing effect reappear?

On August 20, a message from "CoinWorld" stated that the hard fork time of ETC is expected to be advanced to September 13. Because the current block height of ETC is 8629464, ETC previously announced that it would conduct an "Atlantis" hard fork at block height 8772000. According to the current average block speed of ETC of 14.1 seconds, the fork time is expected to be advanced to September 13, Beijing time.

Influenced by this news, the OKEx official website showed that ETC began to surge at around 3 pm yesterday, quickly rising above 6 US dollars, and reached a high of 6.39 US dollars at noon today, an increase of 16%.

ETC market trends from August 20 to 21 Source: OKEx official website

Can the fork-inflation effect be reproduced?

Prior to this, on April 7, Beijing time, insiders of the Ethereum Classic (ETC) ecosystem held a conference call and decided to start discussing the proposed hard fork, "Atlantis". After the announcement, ETC started to surge, rising more than 20% in a single day, reaching a high of $7.9, reproducing the pattern of surges before the hard fork.

We can think of the market performance of other currencies before the fork: In mid-to-late December 2018, ETH continued to soar, directly from a low of $80 to $140. One of the main reasons was the news that ETH would undergo an "Ice Age" fork upgrade in early January this year, which was a speculation on expectations. There was also a surge in BSV when BCH hard forked in November last year. So I don't know if you have noticed that hard forks seem to bring a wave of market.

Will ETC experience another surge before the fork in September? Everyone can pay close attention and seize investment opportunities.

Well, many people may not know much about the hard fork of ETC, so let me give you a brief introduction below.

What exactly is the ETC hard fork?

The ETC hard fork is called Atlantis, which is said to be the first systematic fork of the ETC blockchain. But in fact, this hard fork is different from the hard fork of BCH. It is a systematic upgrade, which is carried out after the community reaches a consensus, so please note that no new coins will be generated.

According to Xu Kang, manager of ETC Asia Pacific Community, this hard fork includes clearing blockchain junk status information, optimizing block statistics and calling algorithms between smart contracts, limiting contract size, adding precompiled ZK-Snarks contracts, etc. Currently, the "Atlantis" hard fork has entered the final testing phase.

To put it bluntly, after this fork upgrade, the functionality, stability and performance of the ETC network will be significantly improved, the block rate will be more predictable, the support for DApp will be better, and it will be compatible with the protocol upgrades implemented by the "Spurious Dragon" and "Byzantium" forks of the Ethereum network. The end result is that ETC will be better compatible with ETH to achieve interoperability.

Xu Kang also stated that the content of the Atlantis hard fork was actually completed at the end of June. Originally, the hard fork could have been executed earlier, but later community members in the United States hoped to have more time to perform tests and contact exchanges, miners and other stakeholders. During the whole period, they experienced many disagreements and disputes, and finally decided to execute the hard fork at the block height of 8772000.

After the Atlantis upgrade, ETC will also conduct an Agharta hard fork this year, and Atlantis will be coordinated with the Agharta upgrade to further enhance the interoperability between ETC and the ETH network. Starting with a set of EIPs activated on Ethereum in 2017, Atlantis is considered the first step to ensure seamless migration of Dapps between any chains.

If the performance and stability of the ETC network can indeed be greatly improved after the fork, it will undoubtedly attract more DApps to the ETC network for development and operation, and the ETC ecosystem will become more prosperous. The market effect that will be generated is exciting.

The development history of ETC

Let's review the development history of ETC. Speaking of the history of ETC, we have to mention the famous The DAO incident.

In June 2016, the DAO project on the Ethereum network was hacked due to a code vulnerability, which directly led to the theft of 3.6 million ETH in the fund pool. At that time, the Ethereum community was forced to choose a hard fork and decided to roll back the transaction to recover the lost funds. Ethereum has been running on the new chain after the fork since then. However, some people in the community believed that this practice violated the decentralized and tamper-proof characteristics of the blockchain. They refused to fork and chose to continue running on the original blockchain. This is the birth of ETC (Ethereum Classic).

After its birth, ETC has had two relatively important consensus hard forks: "modifying monetary policy" and "removing the difficulty bomb".

The reason for modifying the monetary policy is that the ETC community believes that a deflationary policy will create greater long-term value for digital currencies, so they returned to the tradition of the Austrian School of Economics. The total issuance of ETC is set at about 210 million, and the reward will be reduced by 20% for every 5 million blocks. The difficulty bomb was originally set for Ethereum to switch from PoW to PoS. ETC has determined to stick to the development path of PoW, so it no longer needs the difficulty bomb, so it was removed in May 2018. Note: The consensus algorithm and monetary policy are the biggest differences between ETC and ETH.

Next, at the 2018 Consensus Conference, ETC Labs was established to accelerate the development of the ETC community and ecosystem.

Conclusion

ETC currently ranks 20th in the world in terms of market capitalization, far less than Ethereum. As Ethereum's so-called "brother", it seems to be often forgotten in the corner. However, as one of the world's mainstream cryptocurrencies, its future development is still worth paying attention to. I hope to see it really exert its strength in technology, ecology, application, and promotion this year.