Bitmain-affiliated mining pool AntPool announced a $10 million investment in the Ethereum Classic (ETC) ecosystem. The price of the cryptocurrency responded by rising.
Let’s support the ETC ecosystem and incubate high-quality PoW projects together！ https://t.co/AHft6WfGES
— ANTPOOL (@AntPoolofficial) July 27, 2022
“Let’s support the ETC ecosystem and incubate high-quality PoW projects together,” commented AntPool.
The company’s CEO, Leon Love, said during the World Digital Mining Summit 2022 that the amount of investment is planned to increase in the future.
Ethash algorithm is used to mine ETC, just like Ethereum (ETH). The developers of the second-capitalized cryptocurrency have tentatively scheduled an update to The Merge in September, during which the blockchain will switch to the PoS consensus algorithm.
After the upgrade, miners will no longer be able to mine ETH. They are expected to switch to ETC.
In early July, Bitmain began selling the Antminer E9 device for mining cryptocurrencies on Ethash. A company representative announced at a conference that the manufacturer will accept payment in ETC for all Antminer models.
In the last 24 hours, the cryptocurrency’s price has risen 15.8% (CoinGecko). The asset is trading at $27.3.
Barry Silber, founder of asset manager Grayscale Investments, wrote on Twitter:
“I am genuinely excited about The Merge in Ethereum. Who would have thought it!!!”.
In the structure of the 17 cryptocurrency trusts, Ethereum Classic Trust ranks third in terms of AUM with $286.5 million. The figure is second only to bitcoin-based funds ($13.9 billion) and Ethereum ($4.2 billion). At the same time in the ranking by capitalization ETC is 22 positions.
Recall that in 2020, Ethereum Classic network was subjected to several attacks 51%. The developers increased the blockchain’s resistance to them with the activation of the Thanos hardfork.
