It seems all year long, the digital currency community has been abuzz over Ethereum. From its meteoric rise in January, moving from less than #1 USD in value to over $15 USD by mid-February, to the innovative, but ill-fated DAO experiment, Ethereum has been all over the news.
This won’t abate anytime soon, as the recent fork and emergence of an “Ethereum Classic” has created a new storm of controversy, leading one leading Bitcoin exchange to attack.
When digital currency exchanges attack
Digital currency exchange BTC-e posted on their website’s latest news entry that they see major problems with Ethereum Classic. They made an urgent call to their users late last night after conferring with Poloniex recently about Ethereum Classic movement.
BTC-e states:
“Dear Clients! BTC-e’s official standpoint on this issue is as follows: Ethereum Classic in the current circumstances is a scam. The Ethereum community decided to implement the hard fork in order to switch to the new chain. All major pools and exchanges (including BTC-e) did exactly that.”
BTC-e says they have been working with Poloniex on the transfer of ETC on behalf of their customers, and they had virtually no ETC on-hand. Poloniex was looking to find a secure place for the cache of two-day-old ETC.
They explain in the post:
“We continue to receive requests from our customers demanding to return the ETCs that are supposedly deposited in our ETH wallet. We cannot do that for the reason specified above. Anyone, who purports that we sent the coins to Poloniex in order to sell them, can check all the transactions on the blockchain. All transactions are recorded and it is easy to trace the sender and the volumes of coins sent.”
According to CoinMarketCap.com, ETC is trading at just under $2 USD while Ethereum is just under $13 USD, an effective value split of their combined value recently, before the fork.
Some have called this latest development within the Ethereum community a “Fiasco.” This development will not curb such allegations.