The bastard child of the Ethereum (ETH) hard-fork, Ethereum Classic (ETC), has survived its first week. Trading volumes of ETC are now greater than ETH, and the Ethereum Foundation’s dirty laundry is coming to light.
Wondering what ETC is? Here is a quick recap:
- The DAO a “decentralised” venture capital fund raised a bunch of money, US$150 million.
- The code was riddled with security issues, big daddy Vitalik pointed out a few, but Stephan Tual decided to go forth and multiply anyway.
- The DAO code was executed as written, and someone was able to drain US$50m of Ether from the DAO.
- The Foundation aggressively marketed the DAO as a revolutionary application on top of the Ethereum protocol. Some members also speculated in the token itself (more on this later). A failure of the DAO would directly impair their credibility and their ability to purchase Lambos. As a result, they bailed it out via a hard-fork to the Ethereum protocol.
- The Foundation slapped some code together to save the DAO and held a vote (well maybe, some claim it was rigged). Most of those polled agreed to hard-fork the Ethereum protocol, and save the DAO.
- The hard-fork went ahead as planned, theoretically there would now be ETH (the hard-forked coin that the Foundation supported) and its bastard brother ETC (the token representing the Ethereum protocol chain that didn’t bail out the DAO).
- The Foundation told all the exchanges not to allow ETC trading. They said “trust us” no one will trade this shitcoin.
- Poloniex dissented, and was the first exchange to allow the free market to determine ETC’s viability.
- BitMEX was the second exchange to allow ETC trading via a leveraged derivative using only Bitcoin, called ETC7D.
- Bitfinex and Kraken allowed ETC trading a few days later.