What happened

Over the last 24 hours, the price of Ethereum Classic (ETC 2.16%) had surged roughly 16.6% as of 10:28 a.m. ET, as the cryptocurrency looks to be benefiting from Ethereum's upcoming Merge.

So what

Ethereum Classic is the original version of Ethereum and forked from what is now Ethereum after a big hack on the network in 2016. Concerns raised by the hack resulted in the fork, but some people still wanted to use the original blockchain now known as Ethereum Classic. Since then, Ethereum Classic hasn't gotten any of the upgrades that have been done on Ethereum's network.

For years now, the Ethereum network has been preparing to change from the proof-of-work (POW) concept to proof-of-stake (POS). PoW is the original mining concept still used by Bitcoin, in which miners use lots of computing power and energy to solve cryptographic puzzles as fast as possible in order to mine new tokens.

In POS, validators on the network stake their tokens to have a chance to be selected to validate transactions on a new block and mine a new token. POS is much more energy-efficient than POW.

Ethereum's Merge is, at long last, expected to occur sometime between September 10 and September 20. That will essentially put Ethereum POW miners out of business, which seems to be driving the price of Ethereum Classic higher.

"Post Ethereum merge, the Ethereum PoW miners will need to mine other coins since Ethereum is moving to PoS," said Hosam Mazawi of the non-fungible token project Snook, according to CoinDesk. "The options are Ethereum Classic or some new Ethereum fork."

Recently, the hashrate on Ethereum Classic's network, which shows the level of computing power on the network, jumped to 48.64 terahashes, which is up 133% since July. Additionally, the large mining pool BTC.com recently expressed its support for Ethereum Classic and incentivized Ethereum miners to switch to Ethereum Classic once the Merge is complete.

Now what

Ethereum Classic is the original Ethereum blockchain, and it might now get the support of all of the Ethereum POW miners, so there could be further upside ahead if all of the Ethereum POW miners continue to rally around the network and sustain the momentum.