With more core developers and new monetary policy, ETC is becoming more and more interesting.

Rob Viglione is a PhD student in Finance at the University of South Carolina and has an MBA in Finance. He has research interests in crypto finance, asset pricing, and innovation. He was previously a physicist and mathematician and is currently the principal of Key Force Consulting.

Ethereum Classic (ETC) was born as a result of an uprising in a successful cryptocurrency community, caused by the Ethereum hard fork. The core Ethereum project, founded and led by Vitalik Buterin, believed that the $70 million in ether lost by The DAO was too large to just let it go. On July 20, 2016, Ethereum conducted a controversial hard fork that essentially erased the attack on The DAO.

Most of the ETH community supported the move, but a small number of people believed that the hard fork violated the key principle of cryptocurrency: immutability . Immediately after the hard fork, at block 192001, ETC was born.

After ETC was first created, its market value exploded, quickly reaching $225 million, but later fell back to $85 million. Given that the ETC project initially had only one core developer, many market participants believed that the project was basically a speculative pump-and-dump project, and therefore avoided talking about it.

However, these views seem to be changing now. The article "ETC creates a new development path, and the new monetary policy may follow Bitcoin" points out two important new developments of ETC:

1. The number of developers with commit permissions in ETC GitHub has reached 34, far more than the initial 1.

2. ETC is considering adopting a completely different monetary policy from ETH to introduce scarcity to tokens.

Here I will add a third difference between ETC and ETH, which is also of concern to many people in the community: ETH is migrating to POS mining, while ETC continues to maintain POW mining.

The significance of the leap in the number of ETC core developers is self-evident. The life and death of every cryptocurrency depends on the software development talent of this currency.

So I say that investors should pay attention to the changes in monetary policy proposed by ETC. The new monetary policy is completely different from the original monetary policy adopted by ETH (which will generate unlimited tokens).

“Ethereum’s initial release schedule called for a steady amount of new tokens to be mined each year. After the initial 72 million tokens were distributed to pre-sale investors, the Ethereum Foundation, and developers, the project officially launched, and approximately 13 million new tokens were mined each year, and will continue to do so.”

The ETC team is proposing a new monetary policy that would "decay block rewards by 20% every two years, so by around 2070, mined ETC will stabilize at around 200 million - and the total supply will be around 210 million ETC."

ETC future speculation

Forecasting is part art, part science; this is especially true for cryptocurrencies, which lack a valuation template.

Nonetheless, from a speculative perspective, ETC’s recent developments and proposed changes look bullish for the cryptocurrency.

More developers joining the community, a reliable core team, and a reduction in token supply are all positively correlated with value. As for what these values ​​ultimately mean, that's another matter! Is the $85 million market cap in line with the true value of this project?

My gut tells me that ETC will rise in value relative to ETH, possibly dramatically. This could mean ETC grows faster than ETH, or ETH declines as the ETH community migrates to ETC. Or none of the above!

What do you think?

Some netizens commented that:

seablue：I think it's all pretty straightforward, I'll take note and keep watching, as you said, this is the first major split of a well-known blockchain. However, I completely agree with the importance of ETC's immutability, and I also prefer POW over POS. Now I see ETC is defining its own field.

bitcoinmeister: The market is not obsessed with an unlimited number of coins. What I am saying is that when it comes to a store of value, people who put money into cryptocurrencies are not looking to get caught up in inflation. If ETC really caps the total supply at 210 million and continues to stick to POW, then we will see ETC and ETH go head to head in 2017.