The volatility of ETHPoW price
Before Ethereum Merge, the plans of PoW supporters as well as volatility of the upcoming token attract crypto community.
Ethereum Merge is set to transform Ethereum’s mechanism for processing and validating transactions from PoW to PoS. Several ether miners preparing for a protocol fork recently shared “ETHW Mainnet will happen within 24 hours after the Merge”.
“The exact time will be announced 1 hour before the pre-launch countdown and the information includes final code, binary code, configuration file, node information, RPC, explorer,… will be made public when time runs out.”
Not everyone is optimistic about the viability of the opposing project – in the short or long term.
ETH holders will be airdroped ETHPoW tokens at a ratio of 1:1, but the token will have very limited use.
Sunny Aggarwal, co-founder of Osmosis Labs, said that “most tokens on ETHPoW will go to zero.”
USDC issuer Circle has confirmed that the company plans to fully support the PoS chain after The Merge. DeFi projects that use USDC as collateral, as such, must have a near-zero value on the PoW chain.
Kiril Nikolov, a Nexo business manager said:
“The Merge not only makes the network more secure and environmentally friendly – it also helps ETH make better money and store value better.” With Staking yields, it will generate a long-term, infinitely scalable revenue stream for digital asset institutions, lenders and exchanges.”
Tom Dunleavy, senior research analyst at Messari, thinks The Merge is expected to yield 7%-14% on the first day.
Aggarwal said the ETHPoW token will likely still have some intrinsic value.
Decentralized protocols, such as Uniswap that don’t run through oracles — or bridges between a given blockchain and other asset classes — are expected to continue to operate on the PoW version of ether.
ETH PoS and ETH PoW can be distinguished by chainID after the Merge
After the Merge, a simple way to distinguish between ETH PoS and ETH PoW is to test ChainID or a unique string of numbers that allows a Smart contract to identify the origin of the blockchain.
When Ethereum Classic and Ethereum experienced a hard fork – a platform event that enabled the cryptocurrency protocol to split into two or more blockchains – in 2016, developers of both parties were reluctant to change their respective identity mechanisms. This move resulted in a “replay” attack, in which transactions on the old ledger were also considered valid on the latter.
However, in the case of Merge, that’s unlikely. Proof-of-work developers have confirmed plans to use a more modernized verification solution.
