Discover Ethereum PoW (ETHW), it’s easy!

What is Ethereum PoW?

Ethereum PoW is a hard fork of the Ethereum blockchain, created in opposition to the Merge. ETHW is supported by some miners who did not like Ethereum’s move to Proof-of-Stake (PoS). The Ethereum PoW coin retains the original consensus mechanism, Proof-of-Work (PoW). Complex calculations will continue to be solved to mine ETHW in order to create blocks of transactions. This will be done in exchange for greater rewards than PoS validation. The Hard Fork is also justified by hardware specialisation: the GPUs used for ETH mining would otherwise be obsolete, also because they are incompatible with Bitcoin’s ASICs.

Why follow the Ethereum PoW project?

Ethereum PoW is a copy of the pre-Merge state of Ethereum: the main blockchain has split into two, now independent ‘branches’. The ETHW Hard Fork replicates the functions of the ETH blockchain, reproducing the existing smart contracts on the original chain. Ethereum PoW also distributed the ETHW crypto to ETH holders, in a 1:1 airdrop, to mirror wallet balances. The success of the fork will be determined by the support of the community and developers. Despite retaining Ethereum’s DeFi applications, ETHW will indeed have to confirm its usefulness when compared to Ethereum’s main blockchain, which is now more scalable thanks to Proof-of-Stake.

What’s the story behind the project?

The development of Ethereum PoW was spearheaded by Chandler Guo, a well-known Ethereum miner, who presented the idea on Twitter as early as the 27th of July 2022. The project, initially also supported by Justin Sun, gathered support from other miners and defined a roadmap. The ETHW mainnet would be created a few hours after ETH’s Merge  (which took place on the 15th of September 2022) and activated after the creation of 2048 ‘empty’ blocks. The initial computing power (hash rate) of ETHW was around 9% of the total ETH pre-merge, because many miners preferred to switch off their hardware or devote it to other purposes. Later on, given the low value of the Ethereum Proof-of-Work coin, other miners abandoned the ETHW network, decreasing the total hash rate even further.