The existence of Ethereum Classic has caused a lot of controversy in the crypto community. What started off as a simple hard fork to bail-out DAO investors, turned into a split of the Ethereum network into 2 chains.

The competition between both chains is fierce and the markets have turned into a battleground. Both coins dominate liquidity amongst altcoins and tend to have an inverse correlation with each other.

As a trader it’s my personal opinion that ETC may have more upside potential because its market capitalization is lower and the industry is growing rapidly.

Here are my reasons why ETC may be a good investment.

#1: Resilience

Ethereum Classic started off as a small idea and quickly grew into a beast once Poloniex listed the coin. This new market created outrage amongst many who had supported the fork, which lead to a series of attacks against it.

During the first couple of days people saw ETC as an opportunity to get free money and attempts were made to crash the price into oblivion. Despite the efforts of people dumping at the bottom, the price rebounded and gained close to 500% on the third day. Eventually ETC trading volume surpassed that of ETH as traders saw the opportunity to turn a profit.

One of the largest Ethereum miners, Chandler Guo threatened a 51% attack against Ethereum Classic. To everyone’s surprise, rather than carrying out the attack, Chandler had a change of heart and became an avid defender of ETC. He contributed 120GH to protect Classic from a coordinated mining attack by 51pool.org.

Recently, another attack against Classic was subverted as the DAO “white hat hackers” turned rogue and attempted to crash the price by dumping millions of ETC on multiple exchanges. Although they did manage to bring the price down, their plan was mostly foiled because Poloniex froze their account.

Ethereum Classic’s resilience against incessant attacks is showing that it may be another honey badger of crypto. The more attacks ETC survives, the stronger the market will become.

#2: Liquidity

Over the past 2 weeks ETC has surpassed ETH trading volume by 218,000 BTC. Looking at the charts on cryptocompare.com we can see the 2 week volume for ETC was 611,000 BTC compared to the 393,000 BTC of ETH.

Trading volume is an important metric for determining the health of a market. An increase in liquidity shows interest from traders and can often lead to a bull trend. Both coins still rank highest for altcoin volume, yet there’s been a recent decline over the past few days.

#3: Investment Capital

Although Ethereum Classic lacks the big ICO budget that Ethereum has, there may be contributions by several big players in the blockchain space to fund development.

Charles Hoskinson was the CEO of Ethereum in 2014 and played a large role in helping shape the organization in the early days. He’s supporting Ethereum Classic by hiring 3 full-time developers to work on the project.

Chandler Guo also showed support by pledging 50% of ETC trading fees from CHBTC, one of the largest crypto exchanges in China.

Barry Silbert, the founder of the Digital Currency Group, seems to be actively looking for Ethereum Classic startups to invest in. News broke out based on a message Barry sent in the Ethereum Classic slack channel.

DCG has invested in over 70 cryptocurrency businesses, including top companies like Coinbase, BitPay and Ripple.

Fundamentally, we know that money is pouring into the space which means there could be more bullish news on the horizon.

#4: Immutablity

Immutability is the main value proposition of blockchains and was the backbone of Ethereum’s marketing campaign. Changing the history of a blockchain based on political whims sets a dangerous precedence.

Ethereum Classic has a strong purpose in keeping the original social contract of immutable DAPPS. This is a message that has gained support from the greater crypto community.

There is a philosophical incentive from other blockchain communities to see Ethereum Classic thrive, in order to neutralize any bad legal precedence caused by the fork. ETC is a testament to decentralization and free market choice.