ETHPoW Team Prepares for Mainnet Launch, Onboards Mining Pools
Key Takeaways
- EthereumPoW mainnet is slated to launch within the next 24 hours.
- Several major mining pools will start mining ETHW once the network launches.
- Almost all major crypto exchanges will support the ETHW fork and airdrop new tokens to users.
The team behind EthereumPoW (ETHW), a hard fork of Ethereum that has found increasing support among several major proof-of-work (PoW) miners, has announced the launch date of its mainnet.
According to the official Twitter account of EthereumPoW, the fork is projected to happen within the next 24 hours. “Next, within 23 hours, we will publish the 1-hour Count Down Timer for the ETHW mainnet release,” the team said in a tweet shortly after the Merge was completed.
The endeavor is spearheaded by the prominent Chinese crypto miner Chandler Guo, who was also a primary supporter of the Ethereum Classic (ETC) hard fork. ETC is currently among the top 20 cryptocurrencies with a $5.2 billion market capitalization.
Over the past couple of hours, the ETHW team has been busy sharing info about the yet-to-be-launched blockchain. Most recently, the team has shared how users can set up their wallets with OKLink explorer.
Notably, mining pools will start mining ETHW once the mainnet launches. As of now, the list of ETHW mining pools composes a total of 23 different mining pools, including more well-known names like F2Pool, Poolin, AntPool, Nanopool, 2miners, and EthwMine.
“f2pool has launched the ETHW (EtheremPoW) mining pool, the remaining hashrate in our ETH pool is redirected to our ETHW mining pool,” the pool said in an announcement. “ETHW uses the Ethash mining algorithm, it can be mined with current GPUs and the Ethash ASIC mining machines.”
The Ethereum Merge, which completed around 06:42:42 UTC today and marked the end of the PoW Ethereum, has undercut the need for miners. Instead, the PoS Ethereum now uses validators to verify transactions and secure the network; Ethereum staking uses far less energy than the prior PoW method.
This has led to miners looking for alternative options to put their hardware to work. Besides ETHW, Ethereum Classic and Ravencoin are other available options. In fact, computing power on these networks (hashrate) has nearly doubled since the Merge, indicating that miners have switched to mining these PoW coins.
ETHW Plunges After Nice Rally Ahead of the Merge
Ahead of the big upgrade, the ETHW token soared to new highs, reaching $58.54 on September 3, according to data by CoinGecko. Today, shortly after the Merge, the coin also once again saw a nice boost, increasing from around $29 to $52, marking a run-up of around 80% in a couple of hours.
However, the coin has lost nearly all of its daily gains since, plunging to as low as $17. Notably, Ethereum has also failed to gather momentum following the upgrade. The token is currently down by more than 5% over the past 24 hours.
Crypto Exchanges to Support ETHW Fork
The ETHW has gained some traction, pushing almost all major crypto exchanges to support the fork and airdrop new tokens to ETH holders. FTX has already listed the ETHW token, and has reportedly airdropped tokens to ETH holders on the platform.
“Following the Merge where Ethereum sunsets its Proof of Work mechanism and moves on to Proof of Stake, a community of miners moves to hard fork the Ethereum network, giving rise to EthereumPoW,” FTX said. “The hard fork results in an “airdrop” where balances on the Ethereum network are duplicated.”
Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, has also announced that it plans to credit users’ accounts with tokens from any forked versions of Ethereum created during the network’s merge. Coinbase has also said it will “evaluate any potential forks.”
