Crypto Miner Will Attempt a Proof-of-Work ETH Fork
Ethereum is approaching its Merge to proof-of-stake, which will replace the mining with staking to process transactions. This will render many Ethereum mining operations useless unless they find a different coin to mine with their current hardware setups.
ETH miner Chandler Guo, who was also involved in the fork that resulted in Ethereum Classic (ETC) in 2016, announced that ethpow would be coming soon. The miner intends to fork the network so that it never goes through the upcoming merge. This would allow current ETH miners to simply switch over to the forked cryptocurrency/network.
ETC is currently priced at $36.44 USD and ranked 19 with a market cap of $4.96 B USD. ETC prices saw gains over 200% in July where the price jumped from $23 to a high of $43.92 on 7/29.
ETC miners also saw increases in mining revenue the past few months, especially with the upcoming merge. Now they may be worried about the new fork and how that will effect ETC’s pricing and mining ranges. Since Guo is one of the largest supporters of ETC, he will most likely keep that in mind when helping develop the fork.
There are also questions to whether anyone would utilize a PoW forked Ethereum network. Smart contracts would have to be redeployed and the whole ecosystem would be starting from scratch. This would likely make ETC the simpler choice, unless ETHPOW is designed in a way that benefits both miners and offers utilities.
Antpool, crypto mining pools operated by Bitmain announced recently that they invested $10 million USD into the ETC ecosystem.
Let’s support the ETC ecosystem and incubate high-quality PoW projects together！ https://t.co/AHft6WfGES
— ANTPOOL (@AntPoolofficial) July 27, 2022
