Ethereum Classic announces Magneto upgrade; Will the price react?

Ethereum Classic is in the news today after it announced the next network upgrade scheduled for 21st July. The upgrade dubbed Magneto will take place at block 13,189,133 and will implement ECIP-1103. It will also include Ethereum Berlin upgrade features, as per the announcement.

ECIP-1103 will allow the addition of all the protocol upgrades which were a part of the Berlin update that took place in April. The protocols include various EIPs optimizing gas and transactions which pertain to security enhancements important to the network. The implementation of ECIP-1103 will ensure maximum compatibility across the two networks.

According to the schedule shared by the ETC team, changes must have been already deployed on the Mordor Classic PoW testnet on 2nd June and the Kotti Classic PoA testnet on 9 June. The team added,

“To ensure a successful fork, we ask ETC consumers to upgrade their node software to update their clients to a Magneto compatible version if they have not done so already. If you’re not operating nodes or services, but use ETC through other services, then check with that service to ensure they’re supporting the Magneto hard fork.”

While the team is working on the blockchain, ETC has been among the highest returning tokens this year. The digital asset, at press time, was returning 850% year-to-date and hit an all-time high at $184 recently. The growth of ETC has puzzled many chartists who expected the price to hit half of its current ATH by the end of the year. However, it looks like the ETC market managed to appreciate on the back of Ethereum and Bitcoin’s volatility before corrections eventually set in.

In fact, Etherplan’s Donald McIntyre had asserted

that it may continue to benefit from the volatility from ETH and BTC markets. According to him, the price of BTC will hit close to $125,693 by the end of this cycle while ETC’s value would be 5% of BTC’s valuation. This would place ETC at a value between $900 and $1,000.

With the crypto-asset slipping by almost 70% from its all-time high on the back of the aforementioned corrections, the upgrade scheduled in July can help the crypto’s price and might bring it closer to McIntyre’s estimate.