Ethereum Merge Successful, Will Fork ETHW Get Going as Well?

Ethereum’s complete transition from PoW to PoS generated different emotions across the crypto community. Ethereum Investors and stakeholders were ecstatic as the Ethereum Merge sought to improve scalability, lower gas fees, and reduced energy consumption among other critical updates.

The transition from PoW to PoS meant that the Ethereum Foundation replaced miners with validators. The metamorphosis of the network means that miners will be left stranded with costly and useless mining hardware.

Is ETHW real or an opportunistic scam?

In came prominent Chinese miner Chandler Guo who launched a campaign against the transition as miners would be left with costly rigs. Dating back to 2016, Chandler was a major proponent when developers forked Ethereum, with the resulting fork becoming Ethereum Classic (ETC).

According to a long series of tweets from the ETHW account, it seems to be receiving a significant stream of support from several big Ethereum mining pools. But, an account held by the cryptocurrency Miners Community thinks otherwise, and why ETHW is most likely just a scam.

The mining chamber argues that despite the hardfork receiving major support from mining pools, the developers remain unknown. Notably, the anonymity of developers in the crypto sphere remains common. However, it could be a red flag for a replacement to ETH.

The cryptocurrency miners community allegedly accuses the ETHW account of publicizing limited partnerships with mining pools. Citing evidence from one of the mining pools, flexpool_io, the mining pool states that no one from their old website Ethereumpow[dot]org reached out to them for communication.

The Twitter account with 2,873 followers alleges that the first website, ‘Ethereumpow[dot]org’, had no information essential to any trader. The second website barely has any information, either. Nothing about ‘tokenomics’.

The team further states that the ETHW is just a copy-paste of the original ETH, excluding the development team.

Are Crypto Exchanges Backing ETHW?

With the transition event done, crypto exchanges have difficulty choosing whether to list this contentious attempt to resist the transition. Late last month, the largest crypto exchange in America beckoned it may be willing to list ETHW.

Should an ETH PoW fork arise following The Merge, this asset will be reviewed with the same rigor as any other asset that is listed on our exchange.” 

With the efforts to preserve the mining of ETH, Chandler’s campaign of creating ETHW, which is a minable version of ETH operating on PoW, has gained support from Poloniex, Huobi, BitMEX and Bitrue. These crypto exchanges have started listing ETHW-affiliated financial products such as futures and exchange-specific tokens.

For Binance, the largest crypto exchange by trading volume, did not give clear indications of whether the exchange would be listing ETHW. Binance stated that it would consider listing ETHW on a case-by-case basis dependent on “the same strict listing review process” used for other coins.