On 04 Apr, 2018Welcome to the Ethereum Classic Cryptocurrency Review. Interested in investing in cryptocurrency? Access our other cryptocurrency and blockchain related content before you dive in!
Relevant Links
Ethereum Classic Blockchain Use Case
The Ethereum Classic project probably shouldn’t even exist. If it was not for TheDAO incident we wouldn’t even be talking about ETC. But out of the ashes of that debacle rised a project that has earned respect in the crypto community. To learn more about TheDAO click here.
Ethereum Classic has the same use case as Ethereum. It is a platform that allows other developers to build applications on top of it. Programmers can build programs that utilize aspects of a blockchain network without having to build the underlying blockchain. This opens up a whole realm of possibilities for blockchain and the economy as a whole.
The native currency of the platform is ETC. When an application executes a transaction the owner of the program will need to pay the network in ETC. In this sense ETC is the fuel for the machine that is the Ethereum Classic platform. This creates a supply and demand model for the asset.
Development and Management
There are three separate teams that work on the development of Ethereum Classic. Each team focuses on a different aspect of the platform. The three teams are listed below. What we really like about the teams is their transparency. It was extremely easy to find information and past work experience for most of the developers. You can learn more about the teams by clicking on the links below.
The ETCDev Team is the most active and is led by Darcy Reno. He has a ton of programming experience in a variety of different industries which makes him well suited to act as Program Manager. His most relevant experience was with SpaceList. There he functioned as the CEO. SpaceList houses a large database of applicable real estate related information and is utilized by tenants, landlords, and real estate brokers all over the country. His experience in database construction and management may prove vital to the success of the ETCDev Team.
The Founder and current CTO of the team is Igor Artamonov. He is also very qualified with over twenty years of coding and programming experience. Artamonov owns his own software consultancy firm called “The 6 Hours”. He hosts a personal blog where he discuss recent ETC developments and other issues relevant to the cryptocurrency community. You can view his blog by clicking here.
Partnerships and Other Influences
Input Output (IOHK) is a company founded by Charles Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood. Both are early team members of the Ethereum project and are very well respected in the blockchain and cryptocurrency communities. According to their website IOHK “is a technology company committed to using peer-to-peer innovations to provide financial services to the three billion people who don’t have them.”
IOHK’s main venture is the Cardano project which is another blockchain-as-a-service platform similar to ETC. Cardano has yet to release a final product but there is a lot of excitement surrounding it. If their platform is successful it can introduce new features that will change the blockchain landscape.
ETC seems to be building a strong partnership with the Cardano project. The development teams are working closely together and should benefit from each other’s mistakes and successes. The ETC development team is already working on features that will allow both blockchains to interact with one another. In this way ETC is tied to the success of Cardano.
Competitive Advantages and Risks
Competitors
The following are Ethereum Classic’s main competitors:
Competitive Advantages
These should be considered when determining the project’s strengths:
- The project has three independently funded development teams all working on different aspects of the platform. This will allow the project to tackle more issues and create a more flexible service.
- The partnership ETC is forming with Cardano and IOHK is significant. Ethereum Classic will benefit from the resources that these two projects can provide.
- You know what you are getting with ETC. The blockchain is immutable. Period. History has proven this.
- The community has guaranteed that PoW is here to stay for the long term which gives the project stability.
Risks
Risk can hint at a project’s chances of ending in failure:
- ETC suffers from low brand recognition. When you hear Ethereum you instantly think of the Ethereum platform. Ethereum Classic still has a lot of work to do to differentiate itself.
- No central development team can be viewed as a weakness in some ways since there is no absolute direction provided for the community.
- The platform does not have a technological differentiator. Nothing is separating ETC from it’s competitors from a technological standpoint.
Network and User Trends
The Ethereum Classic network has seen a healthy 16.3% increase in the number of transactions it is processing per day over the last 6 months. This puts it roughly on par with the Litecoin network. The ETC network has seen more transactions than competitors like QTUM and Eos over the same time period. It should be mentioned that Eos does not have a live network at the moment and will launch in April.
The amount of active wallet addresses has increased by close to 26% over the last six months. This means that more people are learning about Ethereum Classic. They are either using the platform to create decentralized applications or investing in ETC.
However, the network hashrate has not seen a significant increase over the last 6 months. Network hashrate has only increased by 15% in this time. Compared to Bitcoin (307%) and Ethereum (141%) this is extremely disappointing. This means miners might not believe in the network long term. They only show up when ETC is the most profitable crypto to mine.
Conclusion
Ethereum Classic is literally a project that rose from the dead. After TheDAO incident nobody thought that the network left behind would continue to be maintained. But here we are almost 2 years later and ETC is showing that it is for real.
There’s nothing that jumps out at us when we went through our scoring criteria for ETC. The use case is solid but it’s not especially original The development team is also solid but they’re not something to get overly excited about.
The partnership with Input Output and the Cardano project is definitely a plus. Perhaps this is a solid way to play Cardano. Worst case scenario, if Cardano doesn’t deliver on it’s promise then you still have a cryptocurrency that is the native asset on a platform with a working product.
We believe that a variety of blockchain-as-a-service platforms will exist in the future and we believe Ethereum Classic will be one of them. It’s not the market leader but it has the potential to grow a good deal. You can certainly do much worse in this space.
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