The White Hat Team, whose current members are publicly unknown, has successfully recovered more than seven million ETC, currently valued at around $16 million, by transferring the funds to an address whitelisted by the DAO curator who is known to be working with WHT or has transferred curatorship to WHT.

Alex Van de Sande, one of the previous members of the team, stated he was no longer part of WHT, having left once the hardfork succeeded.

It is not therefore fully clear who exactly transferred the ETC and what they plan to do with the funds, but, since stolen property was recovered, we’d assume it would be returned to the rightful owners.

Time for selling ETC

ETC’s market may, therefore, soon be flooded with millions of new units held by DAO token holders who might instantly sell them for ETH. Moreover, by the end of the month, the DAO thief, who has already moved his loot, will be able to freely sell 3.6 million ETC, currently valued at almost $8 million.  

Ethereum’s Foundation, which last week publicly stated is working 100% on ETH and was joined by as good as all Dapp and ecosystem developers in stating they are also working 100% on ETH, is seemingly following ETH holders and appears to have sold 129,000 ETC and may be preparing to sell another 500,000 ETC.

Or buying?

On the other hand, Barry Silbert, who runs the now acquired Second Market, a custodian of the Bitcoin Investment Trust, “a private… trust that derives its value solely from the price of Bitcoin” and previously known to dislike ETH, publicly stated yesterday that he had sold 0 ETC (which he publicly claimed to have bought at 0.50 cent per unit), that he instead had bought and was buying more and that he does not “intend to personally sell until ETC>ETH.”

Chandler Guo, a Bitcoin and previously an ETH miner who, after threatening to 51% attack ETC, instead moved to mining ETC, outlandishly publicly stated, just 10 minutes after Silbert’s statement, that he too had sold no ETC and he too had actually bought and was buying more. Unlike Silbert, Guo claims he will not sell until one ETC is worth more than one Bitcoin or, at the current price, until one ETC is worth more than $600, a price that would make the DAO thief 3.6 times richer than Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin.

What happens next

Around 11 million ETC will be coming on the market soon, potentially setting a race between DHT token holders and the thief as to who can sell first. ETC effectively has no devs, no leadership, no clear roadmap or direction and a community already divided in regards to whether they will follow POS or POW, with as good as all Ethereum ecosystem Dapps and developers clearly stating they are 100% working on ETH, it is not clear at all how ETC will retain any value. It will be hard-pressed to surpass ETH’s which is backed by Microsoft, Wanxiang, Thomson Reuters, or Bitcoin’s which has had one billion dollars invested in its ecosystem.

But, who knows, with such concepts as immutability of a chain that was just forked, clearly proving the immutability claim wrong, anything can happen.