Ethereum Classic (ETC) Callisto (CLO) Airdrop Announcement Leads to Price Surge and Stability

It appears that long-time ETC holders may be looking at a price surge after the development team announced the Callisto Network project, which will result in a 1:1 airdrop. While some are mistakenly terming it an ETC hard fork, Callisto is actually going to be a new blockchain (with CLO as its native currency), developed in order to test experimental protocols, possible scaling solutions and set up a governance system which incentivizes both miners and coin holders. According to the update: “Callisto is a separate blockchain that is based on Ethereum protocol with its own cryptocurrency (CLO)...Callisto introduces a Cold staking protocol that rewards coin holders for being network participants.” Cold staking is defined as a way to incentivize CLO coin holders by allowing them to stake their coins and earn interest, without having to validate transactions, since consensus will continue to be achieved via Proof-of-Work (POW). Essentially, the problems to be solved with the Callisto project are outlined as under: There is no incentive for coin holders to continue to own coins which is important for “store of value” currencies. Interest and influence in the network are not balanced. The balance is strongly biased towards the miners. Lack of governance system. Cold staking protocol could serve as an intermediate step for governance system implementation.  The update also discusses Callisto’s initial distribution, announcing the airdrop for ETC holders: “It was decided to distribute the initial stake of CLO between current ETC holders. We will make a snapshot of ETC blockchain at block 5500000 (approximately 5 March, 2018. This depends on ETC block time and ETC hashrate changes). Then we implement the initial balance of each ETC holder in the Callisto network genesis block, so each ETC owner will receive CLO coins automatically in a 1:1 ratio to the amount of ETC that he had at block 5500000.” Following the announcement, ETC surged from under $40 to a high of $46, before correcting as long-term holders possibly took profits and Bitcoin took a dive, initiating an overall market decline. However, this time around ETC seems to be a lot more stable, not dropping as much as it usually does at the first sign of a Bitcoin dip. Whether ETC will pull a NXT, remains to be seen, but given how the snapshot is expected in early March, ETC’s price may experience swings as investors attempt to accumulate and traders seek easy profits. That being said, it should be noted that in terms of BTC price, ETC is still trading almost three times below its all-time-high of 919k Sats. We will continue to update this story as we learn more about wallets and exchanges (if any) which support the Callisto (CLO) airdrop.