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Leading forks of top cryptocurrencies, bitcoin, and ethereum, were meant to provide more value, but where did they end up?
Forks in blockchain networks are meant for upgrading the features and making them relevant to cope with the needs and ultimately up to date with the demands. Cryptocurrency forks focused on making blockchain networks more scalable and secure and added more such features. It also becomes sustainable for them to use the forks or updates to create entirely new coins and ecosystems on the developer’s end.
Are they doing the same as theory was expected to do when talking about the two leading forks of the biggest and most popular blockchains: Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum Classic? Are these leading forks providing those meanings or adding those values they are meant to provide? They are not, and stats prove this as neither of these leading forks is doing any great, especially in comparison to their root or parent chains.
The actual question raised here is, why does this matter after all? It’s important because blockchains generally run on open source software as they can be forked always, anytime. The fork is used as the term for whenever someone makes or brings some change in the network which is not approved by the codebase in charge of developers. The fork ensures that the developers in charge of maintaining the codebase will be checked from swinging the changes away from their users’ wants.
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Both the forks of Bitcoin and Ethereum made huge popularity and news at the time of their release.
Bitcoin was upgraded or, in crypto terms, forked by the end of the so-called ongoing ‘Block Size War’ that resulted in Bitcoin Cash from the core Bitcoin network in 2017. The fork made the bitcoin act such that the person holding bitcoin had bitcoin cash when the chain split suddenly.
As far as the Ethereum Classic fork is concerned, it was created after the hard fork of the main Ethereum network in 2016 that followed the stealing of the funds held by the project on the network called ‘The DAO’. To this day, the original chain, which is Ethereum Classic, is maintained by a small subset of a handful of miners and developers.
The difference between the market cap of main networks and their forks is enough to validate if the upgraded network version performed well or not. For instance, Bitcoin has about a $781 billion market cap, whereas Bitcoin Cash is a meager $6 billion. Similarly, Ethereum has about $371 billion in its total market cap, while Ethereum Classic possesses only $5 billion.
Nancy J. Allen is a crypto enthusiast, with a major in macroeconomics and minor in business statistics. She believes that cryptocurrencies inspire people to be their own banks, and step aside from traditional monetary exchange systems. She is also intrigued by blockchain technology and its functioning. She frequently researches, and posts content on the top altcoins, their theoretical working principles and technical price predictions.
