Ethereum 2.0 Is Already Here! But The PoW Concept Isn’t Going Obsolete Anytime Soon!
To make sure that a $19B mining industry doesn’t end up obsolete, the ETHW Core has brought a new chain that will still support PoW. Read on to learn more
On 15 September 2022, crypto enthusiasts around the world witnessed the much-anticipated Ethereum Merge due for almost half a decade. Ethereum’s original blockchain — which was based on the Proof Of Work (PoW) protocol — has successfully merged with the Beacon Chain launched on 01 December 2020. The transition was largely cheered since it’s estimated that Ethereum’s new Proof Of Stake (PoS) protocol would reduce the energy consumption by 99.98% and shave off 0.2% of the global consumption. However, the merge paved the way for another blockchain!
The Genesis Of ETHW
The Ethereum Proof Of Work — or ETHW — is a hard fork of the Ethereum blockchain in response to the Ethereum Merge that got executed on 15 September 2022. The Ethereum Merge has been the first instance where an existing and running blockchain — that too, with such high volume — has made a successful transition from PoW to PoS. While the merge has been hugely praised — notably for its energy efficiency — the consequences of entirely shredding down a functional PoW with a track record of 12 years being reliable, robust, and censorship resilient aren’t as smooth.
Further Reading: Get Ready For An Upcoming Bulls Market With The Ethereum Merger
What Makes ETHW Unique?
With an estimated evaluation of $19 billion, it was evident that the Ethereum Merge would render the ETH mining industry completely obsolete. And since Ethereum has traditionally been reliant on dedicated GPUs for mining, once the merger is done, miners can’t simply switch to mining Bitcoin or other PoW token since the majority have already switched to using ASICs. In response to this ongoing issue in the Ethereum mining industry, an unknown group of Ethereum developers have created EthereumPoW that is aimed to continue as a hard fork on the original PoW state.
“It seems that the Ethereum Foundation will not slow down moving to PoS, so it’s time to talk about ETHW, the PoW chain, which is the backbone that the Web3 is currently built upon. It is only prudent to continue a PoW Ethereum, which should be a no-brainer for those who champion openness and the free market as there is no downside to it!”
Since then, the ETH Core has launched its mainnet within just eight hours following the Ethereum Merge, as it had previously stated in a recent blog post.
This major move — which is also referred as a hard fork — will split the PoW chain from the newly-merged Ethereum network and will develop a new token, the EthereumPoW or ETHW. Once the new mainnet was launched, a number of mining pools — such as F2Pool and Poolin have carried on mining with a handful of cryptocurrency exchanges already moving forward to distributing the new chain’s token to ETH holders.
Further Reading: Analysts Predict That BTC Could Surge By 50% If This Happens
Non-Financial Advice: The data, resources, and statistics in this article have been consolidated from multiple sources and neither the author nor the site is responsible for any financial profit/loss incurred from the data and opinions present in this article. Readers understand that all risks associated with cryptocurrency are taken on by themselves.
