A prominent digital currency trading service reports that investors are expressing an interest in buying into the version of the ethereum blockchain that rejected last week’s hard fork.

Over-the-counter digital currency trading service Genesis Global Trading is now trading classic ethers (ETC), but reports its volume at less than $100,000 in purchases thus far. Serving institutions and individuals, Genesis sells blocks of the digital currency, as well as alternatives such as bitcoin, with a minimum order size of $25,000.

Despite a small number of initial buyers, CEO Michael Moro said he is confident that demand could begin to rise for the nascent digital currency, which has been winning over users as a protest tool and, in recent days, building a budding market.

Moro told CoinDesk:

“We started to explore ETC over the weekend based on some inquiries we received. People were looking for a place to buy and sell ETC, and Genesis was happy to provide a market.”

Moro went on to characterize institutional interest in ether as “minimal”, while cautioning that it’s too early to draw comparisons between the two digital currencies at this stage.

The news comes amid an increase in the price of classic ethers, which has risen more than 250% in the last 24 hours. The price of ether, by comparison, has fallen roughly 5% in that time.

At press time, the price of 1 ETC was trading for 0.0028 BTC (or roughly $1.80), up from $0.50 yesterday.

Disclosure: CoinDesk is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which owns Genesis Trading.

Trading desk image via Shutterstock