ETC fell more than 20% in a week, and speculation is no longer able to support prices

ETC prices have fallen sharply over the past week as investor interest in the newly created digital currency appears to be waning.

The price correction appears to have taken some of the momentum away from the nascent Ethereum Classic blockchain, which has seen significant price and volume gains despite some analysts predicting it would soon disappear when it first emerged.

But these growths came to a halt this week, with ETC’s price against ETH plummeting 23.47% over the past week, according to data from the Poloniex exchange. During the same period, ETC’s price against the U.S. dollar fell 23.16%.

At press time, ETC prices have risen slightly by 1.5% over the past 24 hours.

For those who are not familiar with ETC, the digital currency was born in late July this year because some idealists who opposed the Ethereum hard fork began to support the original Ethereum blockchain market, which did not undergo a hard fork and a series of technical changes.

The digital currency exchange Poloniex launched ETC/BTC and ETC/ETH trading pairs on July 24, which helped the development of ETC. After that, the price of ETC against ETH rose rapidly, soaring by more than 2,000% in early August.

Trading volume and enthusiasm waned

This week’s price action comes against a backdrop of subdued trading volume.

According to CoinMarketCap data, during this week, market participants traded a total of $38.1 million worth of ETC, with daily trading volumes ranging from a minimum of $1.87 million to a maximum of $9.5 million.

In contrast, ETC transaction volume surged in late July and early August, reaching $103.1 million on July 26 and $147.86 million on August 2.

After a strong start, some have expressed concerns that the currency is suffering from excitement fatigue.

This is a common problem for altcoins, many of which experience a waning of interest because they offer little more than speculative value. Petar Zivkovski, head of operations at bitcoin trading service Whaleclub, said:

“As trading volumes dropped in August, there was no more speculative demand to sustain prices, so prices fell, and that was a clear sign.”

However, Zivkovski stressed his view that ETC has a better future than many other altcoins, and that the digital currency may experience such cyclical price changes, unlike other altcoins, which may only experience one or two such cycles before their trading volume drops and disappears.

Jacob Eliosoff, a cryptocurrency investment fund manager, noted that some ETC supporters are still very enthusiastic, and therefore, he asserted that these people will not be "exiting ETC" anytime soon.

However, he also stressed that not all ETC supporters are so excited, and some of these supporters may be lukewarm about the currency.

He said:

“Maybe there’s a small group of people who aren’t very committed to ETC and are starting to take action.”