ETC rose by more than 30%, and its computing power soared by 68%. Its market value is expected to exceed ETH in 2017

ETC prices staged a major counterattack this week.

As the nascent digital currency surged in value, its computing power also grew, and ETC announced new monetary policy proposals.

According to data from CoinMarketCap, ETC has risen by as much as 37% this week, climbing from $0.81 at the opening to $1.11.

Market observers also gave the project a positive review. Petar Zivkovski, COO of Whaleclub leveraged trading platform, said:

“ETC is being embraced by the community as a preferred decentralized alternative to ETH.”

He claimed that while ‘ETC and ETH are competing for the same piece of the pie,’ some market observers predict that ETC’s market cap will surpass ETH in 2017 or 2018.

Is the Chinese community dissatisfied with ETH?

Arthur Hayes, CEO of BitMEX exchange, gave a similar prediction, telling CoinDesk, “I expect ETH to reach parity with ETH by the first quarter of 2017.” He further elaborated on the upside facing ETC, saying:

“The Chinese ETC community is not happy with the direction of Ethereum development led by Vitalik. This is mainly due to The DAO incident. ETC is the retribution for Vitalik’s side.”

Now it seems that the winner of ETH’s decline may be ETC.

In addition to the sharp rise in prices, another sign of the increase in ETC usage is the increase in its computing power . According to GasTracker.io data, from 12:00 UTC on December 10 to 6:00 UTC on December 16, in just a few days, ETC computing power increased by 68%, from 534GH/s to 899.47GH/s.

Kong Gao, overseas market manager at bitcoin trader RichFund, speculated on various factors that could further drive up ETC’s hash rate, including the continued decline in Zcash prices and ETH’s migration to POS.

All speculation aside, higher hashrate will also make the ETC network less vulnerable to 51% attacks, which is also good news.

ETC still faces some obstacles

Although ETC has made some great progress recently, there are still some obstacles that the platform may need to overcome if it wants to catch up with or surpass ETH. The first is that ETH benefits from a strong network effect.

Jacob Eliosoff, an algorithmic trader, said:

“ETH currently still has a strong network effect, which will promote ETH to be more widely used and increasingly dominant.”

However, he added,

“The ETC team has been doing a good job of dampening this effect, especially by reinforcing the differences between ETC and ETH.”

Zivkovski believes that it is critical that ETC gains wider adoption, stressing that in order to gain long-term viability, ETC will need to ‘expand outside the community and attract new developers to build on the platform,’ which he believes is ‘not an easy task.’

If ETC succeeds in surpassing ETH’s market cap, then the former will gain some considerable gains. According to CoinMarketCap data, the current market cap of ETC has reached $94 million, which is less than 15% of ETH ($680 million).