The price of Ethereum Classic (ETC) seems to have surged over 12% due to excitement surrounding the upcoming Atlantis hard fork event.

According to data from CryptoCompare, Ethereum Classic started its impressive surge around 06:00 UTC on Tuesday (August 20) when ETC was trading at $5.499. By 02:00 UTC on Wednesday (August 21), the ETC price had reached $6.272, for an increase of just over 14%.

At press time (06:17 UTC on August 21), Ethereum Classic is trading at 6.176, up over 12.19% in the past 24-hour period:

ETC-USD 24 Hour Chart - 21 August 2019.png
  

The most likely explanation for Ethereum Classic’s price action seems to be excitement over Atlantis, the planned hard fork (at block 8,772,000), which is expected to take place on Friday, September 13.

According to the Medium blog post by Stevan Lohja, Technology Coordinator at Ethereum Classic Labs, Atlantis “implements Ethereum’s Byzantium and Spurious Dragon upgrades to the Ethereum Classic network and has been adopted as an accepted Ethereum Classic Improvement specification which can be found at ECIP-1054.”

Lohja also reminds us that the “Kotti test network underwent a hard fork on June 19 at block 716,617 and Morden test network on Jul 29 at block 4,729,274.”

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