Ethereum PoW Reveals Post-Merge Plans

The Ethereum Proof-of-Work chain has revealed its plans for the mainnet after The Merge is fully implemented. 

ETHW Launching After Merge

The Ethereum PoW chain is a fork of the Ethereum network that will continue working on the Proof-of-Work mechanism after The Merge, which set to bring huge energy-efficiency to the ETH network by switching it to a PoS mechanism. The PoW chain has its own Twitter handle, where it posted its future plans for the mainnet, going into the details. 

According to the announcement, the Ethereum PoW mainnet, which is being dubbed the ETHW mainnet, will be launched within 24 hours of the Merge and will be announced an hour before with a countdown timer. Once the 1-hour timer runs out, final code, binaries, configuration files, nodes info, RPC, explorer, etc. will be made public. 

ETHW Lists Launch Details

The ETHW team has also disclosed that the mainnet will start 2,048 empty blocks beyond the Merge block, adding padding to ensure that the chainID (a unique identifier to differentiate among blockchains) switches to 10001 successfully and that the chain is the longest chain of ETHW. Therefore the first block to be able to contain any transaction on ETHW will be the Merge block + 2049 blocks. Furthermore, any block rewards for the empty blocks will be directed to the 1559 multi-sig wallet. According to the announcement, the initial mining difficulty will be limited to 220 T which is equal to a hashrate of 15 TH/s. The Twitter thread also published full node data to help users prepare their own nodes. 

ETHC Developer Criticizes Move

The ETHW hardfork was devised and announced by Chinese crypto miner Chandler Guo and has already garnered severe criticism from the community. Even the developer of the Ethereum Classic, which is another hard fork of the Ethereum network, Igor Artamonov, has criticized the move. 

Artamonov has questioned the motive of the hard fork, saying, 

“The main sell point could be ‘PoW is more secure. But they sell it under ‘miners need to earn money.’ Why??? That’s stupid. That’s not why people would use a blockchain. ‘Safety’ would be a better reason.”

Artomonov has also criticized the fact that the ETHW has not on-boarded a real developer. He has also questioned the decision to launch the ETHW network after the Merge, claiming that the best time to launch it would be few hours before the Merge in order to grab attention at the most critical moment. He said that the decision by the ETHW team will end up losing 90% of the momentum just on launch as no body would take it seriously if its not  continuous chain. 

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.