Ethereum Classic (ETC) continues to maintain its parabolic price action advance that began in late March.
Data from crypto market aggregator Coingecko shows ETC is up almost 50% in the last 24-hour trading period as of the time of writing.
Indeed, the 20th-ranked crypto by market capitalization is currently at an all-time high above $76.
Source: TradingView
The first likely reason for this current price action advance is that it is a continuation of ETC’s positive performance since the end of Q1 2021.
As previously reported by Cointelegraph, major forks like ETC and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) had been seeing significant upward moves. ETC was a consequence of the Ethereum hard fork that ensued after disagreements on the best course of action to rectify the decentralized autonomous organization debacle of July 2016.
Retail hype is also building on ETC especially as the token is available to buy on the popular trading app Robinhood. Online search volume for Ethereum Classic is on the high, according to data from Google Trends.
This current retail hype may also be attributed to Ether (ETH) smashing its all-time high and moving beyond $3,000 for the first time. Indeed, social media sentiment points to newbie ETC holders considering the “green Ethereum” a much cheaper alternative to the ETH juggernaut.
ETC has also outperformed ETH in terms of year-to-date price action gains by a factor of over three-fold.
Retail traders are not the only investors keen on adding to their ETC bags as Grayscale has also been upping its Ethereum Classic ownership. The Grayscale Ethereum Classic Trust currently holds about $711.6 million in assets under management.
ETC’s positive price performance so far in 2021 also offers some reprieve for a project plagued by security issues in 2020. The green Ethereum suffered multiple 51% attacks with millions of dollars in ETC siphoned from the project.
With cryptos like ETC, BCH and Dogecoin (DOGE) printing significant price gains, the alt season narrative continues to build especially amid Bitcoin’s (BTC) current stutter. The Bitcoin market capitalization dominance is also at its lowest level since July 2018.