According to coinmarketcap.com who does cryptocurrency market capitalizations, newly-split Ethereum Classic is now trading third, just behind Bitcoin and Ethereum on the list of the world’s top cryptocurrencies.

This new entrant, which currently stands in sixth position on the list of cryptocurrencies with the largest market cap after Bitcoin, Ethereum, Steem, Ripple and Litecoin, is worth $76m selling at $0.926285 per unit and has recorded $14.1m in trading within 24 hours (as at the time of publication). Dash has also moved from the eighth to the seventh position, though with a small margin with NEM.

Whether this pace will be sustained is yet indeterminate as it is too early to judge. Also, coinmartketcap.com has yet to provide its 24-hour percentage change and plot its price graph.

However, if the trading continues in this fashion, ETC could become the third largest cryptocurrency in the market sooner than could be imagined to beat Steem, Ripple and Litecoin whose 24-hour trading were pegged at $499,437, $357,329 and $1,539,310 respectively.     

Ethereum Classic noted on its website:    

“ The most important question for traders is 'will ETC have market price'? There are many reasons to believe that it will. Essentially, ETC is an Ethereum 'spinoff coin' with a wide user base of all current ETH users. Some of them will see the value of transacting on a censorship-resistant chain, some won't. This creates interesting arbitrage opportunities for smart traders. Additional reasoning why EHTC is very unlikely to be 'worthless'.”

Its creators claim that they believe in decentralized, censorship-resistant, permissionless Blockchains and the original vision of Ethereum as a world computer which can't shut down but runs irreversible smart contracts.

They cite Ethereum Foundation’s response to the DAO debacle to be a bailout hardfork against ‘principled opposition of a significant economic minority of Ethereum stakeholders’ - 19% of ETH holders who oppose the hardfork and about 22% of Ethereum miners who voted against the previous 'DAO softfork' and would logically oppose hardfork as well.

They say such a significant minority of stakeholders should not be silenced or intimidated into submission - they should be given a clear choice.