Coinbase dominated headlines across the space this week with a pair of significant developments. The San Francisco–based exchange announced on Monday, June 11, its intention to add Ethereum Classic to its trading platform and then quickly followed the news on Tuesday with the official opening of a crypto index fund.
Its addition to the exchange has revamped public interest in Ethereum Classic and sent the price of its native currency, ETC, into a dramatic state of flux.
Ethereum Classic
In May[1] of 2016, The DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization and venture capital fund, raised a sum of $150 million for investment in smart contract projects built on the Ethereum blockchain. It was, at the time[2], the largest crowdfunded project ever created.
On June 18, 2016[3], hackers successfully exploited a weakness in the splitting function of the protocol that allowed for the extraction of ether from multiple DAO smart contracts while utilizing the same DAO tokens. The end result was a theft of 3.6 million ether that was worth roughly $70 million.
Debate[4] arose within the Ethereum community regarding a proper response to the attack. After a failed soft fork, a vote in July[5] concluded that a hard fork would be instituted to erase the DAO hack by placing the compromised ETH in a new smart contract that would then be used to redistribute the funds to their original owners. The decision, though approved by a super majority of 89 percent, was extremely controversial. Anti-forkers contended[6] that although the DAO hack was unfortunate, code is law. All transactions are innately immutable and should remain free from modification or censorship, regardless of the justification.
When the hard fork was implemented on July
