It has been a little over a week that the Ethereum community completed hard fork to undo the DAO hack. However, this historic event has lead to the creation of “Ethereum Classic” that believes in the original vision of Ethereum prior to the fork.

“The main goal of the project [Ethereum Classic] is to ensure survival of the original Ethereum blockchain. We will strive to provide alternative for people who strongly disagree with DAO bailout and the direction Ethereum Foundation is taking their project. Anyone opting to remain on the original chain should have such opportunity”, the project’s website reads.

Leading cryptocurrency exchanges including Poloniex, Kraken, Bittrex, along with cryptocurrency mining pool Minergate and others have announced their support for Ethereum Classic (ETC).

Speaking with EconoTimes, Bittrex CEO Bill Shihara explained the reason for their decision saying, “Bittrex has allowed the trading of Ethereum Classic.  Exchanges exist for fair price discovery and we’re receptive to the demands of our customers.  Our stance is to remain neutral and simply let the market decide what the value is of a token.”

Users who had ETH before block 1920000 now have both ETH (the fork chain) and ETC (the community effort to continue the no-fork chain), Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder explains in a blog post. He advised users interested in taking any actions with their ETC to use the splitter contract at address “0xaa1a6e3e6ef20068f7f8d8c835d2d22fd5116444” to move their ETC to a separate newly created account so as to avoid “replay attacks”.

Shihara explained replay attack saying, “If you had 100 ETH stored in an address you control pre-fork, you now have 100 ETH Classic and 100 ETH in that address on both forks.  The replay attack stems from the fact that transactions on each chain are valid on the other.  If I transfer 50 ETH Classic from my wallet because I want to sell it, the replay attack will also transfer 50 ETH from your wallet.  If you are unaware of this fact, you may have just given someone ETC or ETH.  The fix is to use a smart contract to “split” your coins by putting them into unique addresses on each fork.  If I have 100 ETH in address A and 100 ETC in address B, I can transfer 50 ETC without worrying that my 50 ETH is also being transferred.” 

San Francisco-based digital currency exchange Coinbase, however, has announced that it has no plans to support ETC. In an online post, the company stated:

“Coinbase launched support for ETH after last week’s hard fork in the Ethereum network. Since launch, Coinbase has exclusively supported transactions and trading in ETH -- not ETC... At this time, Coinbase has no plans to support ETC, although we will continue to monitor the situation and evaluate customer demand.”

At the time of writing, Ethereum Classic is the sixth largest cryptocurrency by market cap, trading at $1.51. When asked about the ultimate outcome of these competing currencies, Shihara said:

“It's still too soon to tell as were only in day 3 of trading but the price and hash rate is increasing.  That is a promising start.  Ideally, both chains operate independently and provide a choice to users of which project philosophy to support.”