Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency by market size, has just jumped back above the one billion dollar market value benchmark in an apparent demonstration of confidence by investors in the venture following the hard fork activation process that just occurred.

The ETH/USD exchange rate now stands at about $12.5 per Ethereum, over 11% higher than its level just twenty four hours. The move was supported by over $47 million in daily trading volumes.

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What is a ‘hard fork’?

Following the attack on the DAO, which saw over $50 million in ETH stolen, the creator of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, supported the idea of splitting the blockchain and resetting it as much as possible to the state before the hacking. Late last week, the Ethereum community voted to adopt the measure and than all that was needed was for those actually operating the network to adopt it. Less than an hour ago when block number 1920000 was reached the process kicked in.

This solution was highly criticised by members of the cryptocurrency community, mainly in online forums, as a betrayal of some of the principles of a currency controlled only by programming code and not by people or central banks. The proponents of the hard fork are celebrating their apparent achievement right now.

Ethereum has now forked, all clients (pyeth, geth, parity, EtheremJ) are in sync 8 blocks in #blockchain

— Stephan Tual (@stephantual) July 20, 2016

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PSA: as expected, people are already replaying non-hard fork transactions. Very likely this will render so-called ETHC quickly irrelevant

— Stephan Tual (@stephantual) July 20, 2016

So far so good for Ethereum hark fork… new chain over 50 blocks ahead of old.

— Erik Voorhees (@ErikVoorhees) July 20, 2016