No one can deny that cryptos are definitely seeing a great time. Even the ones who faced pretty bad situations recently are now growing in price together with Bitcoin (BTC).

Ethereum Classic, a hard forked token from the original Ethereum blockchain, is a great example of how great are the times in which we are in.

Ethereum Classic is far from a big winner during its history. The official Ethereum was the network that changed its code back in 2017, while the Classic version remained the same. However, the so-called official ETH is now the second largest token in the market and ETC is not even close.

While users fiercely affirm that they are the real Ethereum, not a lot of people actually believe this. To make matters even worse, ETC recently was the victim of a 51% attack. From Sunday, April 7, up until today, ETC is 35% up, though. How did that happen?

Nobody is exactly sure of what is going on here, but what is clear at the moment is that ETC is trading high. While its prices were around $6.66 USD at 4 a. m. on Coinbase, they were at $10 USD two hours later. This is very fishy, that’s for sure, and some people believe that a pump and dump scheme may be happening right now, but it is hard to tell.

While no technicals show why the prices are going up, some specialists believe that the fear of missing out (FOMO) may be acting out, especially as many analysts are affirming right now that the bear market is gone and that we are on the eve of a new bull run, which will raise the prices of all the altcoins.

Bitcoin may be getting more stable this time, as it has a high market cap, but small altcoins like Ethereum Classic rise and fall very quickly, which may help a lot of people to speculate on this assets.

Jehan Chu, the managing partner at Kenetic Capital, has affirmed that these small markets are also very “emotionally driven” and that fervor builds up pretty quickly, but they also go down much quicker. Chu hopes that the price increase will benefit ETC, though.

He affirmed that this may be good, as ETC lags behind in tech but has a lot of untapped potential and the price increase can revive the asset in order to make it more valuable and interesting again.

The volume of ETC trading was also very high lately, as the token more than doubled its $350 million USD trading volume to $800 million USD when the prices were going up.

At the moment, however, the prices have already gone back to the $7 USD price range and, while they continue to be high, they simply are not as high anymore as they were when the token was starting to go up, which may corroborate on the theory that we were seeing a pump and dump scheme going on.

The latest BTC bull run, which has been affecting all these altcoins, was started when someone put an order to buy 20,000 Bitcoin on the Kraken exchange.

The Atlantis Update

A theory that was not very well received said that the price of the token may be increasing because the Atlantis update “draws near”. However, the update is set for the block 8,750,000 in September 2019, so we can say without any mistake that it is far from near.

There are some major improvements related to Atlantis. One of them is that it will make ETC easier to run. It will add several new contracts and opcodes that will make the whole network much more operational and interoperable.

Also, it is said that the new technology will be better for decentralized applications (dapps) and that it will make it simpler for the developers to access smart contracts. It will also change the mining difficulty of the network to ensure constant block times and make the network more predictable.

The 51% Attack

ETC was a relatively stable Top 20 crypto. However, last January, the token was the victim of a successful 51% attack. If you do not what this is, you should understand that a 51% attack is when malicious agents get over half of the network under their control and are able to control malicious transactions to steal money.

The hackers stole 54,000 ETC (over $300,000 USD) at the time by rolling back transactions during four hours on January 7. Gate.io, which was attacked, covered the losses from the users but it was a very disheartening experience overall.

Even after the chaos, it looks like the ETC community still has some strength or we would not have seen such an important growth recently.