The merge update will inevitably lead to the emergence of the PoW Ethereum fork in response to a request from the community, miners, hardware manufacturers and exchanges. This was stated by representatives of the network branching project.

At the end of July, influential miner Chandler Goh proposed the idea of ​​launching an Ethereum fork that would continue working on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm. The new Ethereum PoW (ETHW) network is designed to allow cryptocurrency miners to continue working after the Ethereum mainnet is merged with the Beacon Chain and migrated to Proof-of-Stake (PoS).

Ethereum developers have scheduled the update to be activated on September 15-16.

On August 9, Bob Summerville, president of the ETC Cooperative, sent Guo an open letter in which he questioned the viability of the fork. According to him, the supporters of the project did not have time to solve the necessary technical and organizational issues.

Summerville also noted that even if a new network does emerge, it doesn’t see any benefits for consumers. Summerville noted that the largest stablecoins will not arouse interest among issuers of DeFi and NFT projects and most developers of Ethereum applications.

As a result, The Merge proposed after its miners migrated to mining the current fork – Ethereum Classic (ETC), whose ecosystem is supported by the organization whose development is leading.

In a response letter to Summerville, ETHW supporters rejected his main arguments. Regarding the technical side, they reported that a core development team has been formed:

• defused the difficulty bomb;
• updated the network ID;
• Additional protection against replay attacks.

A testnet was created to test the solutions, and the Ethereum codebase requires minimal changes for the fork, and ETHW representatives added that it was “almost complete.”

According to them, a group of enthusiastic volunteers work “around the world” with exchanges and wallet providers. Currently, six platforms support ETHW trading in the form of IOUs or futures.

ETHW supporters said industry players “won’t want to miss the opportunity” regarding the lack of interest in the new network. According to them, there is a broad demand in the Ethereum community to maintain the PoW chain. They promised to present specific steps to improve the ecosystem within three weeks.

ETHW supporters of Summerville’s proposal to switch to ETC mining noted that the hash rate of its network is 27 TH/s, while 996 TH/s will be released after Ethereum’s transition to PoS. According to them, a small ETC mining pool cannot accept such capacities.

“ETC hasn’t grown since it was born. In the last five or six years it froze, stagnated and failed to form any ecosystem. It is quite possible that ETC will remain a giant baby,” the developers added.

Recall that JPMorgan analysts acknowledged that after Ethereum’s transition to PoS, the main beneficiary of miner flow will be ETC.

CoinShares experts were also skeptical about the viability of potential ETHW.

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