After the long-awaited launch of The Merge, the new cryptocurrency EthereumPow dropped 65% from its address. While the crypto has seen a spike in mining over the past few days, does ETHW still have a chance?
ETHPoW what exactly?
EthereumPoW is a branch (fork) of the famous Ethereum called Proof of Work or proof of work in French. Proof-of-work is a widely used blockchain consensus mechanism. However, even if it is very secure, it creates problems in terms of energy consumption and governance.
This technology is based on mining, to create new blocks and validate the authenticity of transactions. As you will understand, Ethereum PoW is a cryptocurrency that works exactly like the old Ethereum system.
EthereumPoW was launched after The Merge but they seem to be facing technical problems. The creators of EthereumPoW have posted a tutorial to connect your wallet to ETH PoW. However, some users have reported problems connecting their meta wallets to ETH PoW.
— HM (@HamzahM92) September 15, 2022
The problem would simply come from a bad ID. This would be similar to the Bitcoin Cash testnet. Internet user @cascadia_coin reported this on the networks:
“The network with channel ID 10001 may be using a different currency symbol (BCHT) than you entered. Please check before continuing“.
Blockchain company Consensys which is closely related to Ethereum has published a technical response to this identity issue:
“The channel ID is a node management property of the channel. It is used to protect against transaction rejection. The effect of adjusting the Chain ID is to change one of the transaction parameters, which is the V parameter. The v parameter is set to 2*ChainID + 35/36. For the Ethereum mainnet, which has a chain ID of 1. This means that each transaction has a value of 37 or 38“.
However, if we look at the crypto exchange platforms, we can see that they all accept Ethereum PoW (ByBit, FTX, Kraken …) despite all the problems that Ethereum PoW currently has.
These technical problems caused the value of Ethereum PoW to drop significantly as can be seen on this graph. ETHPoW price today is $12.88 with a 24 hour trading volume of $152,028,763. ETPoW has decreased by 55.01% in the last 24 hours.
Hashrate decreasing
If we look at the Hashrate of Ethereum PoW we see a decrease from launch. In fact it went to more than 80 TH/s at 62.38 TH/s at the time this article was written. However, there has been a slight increase in the last few hours.
The miners seem to have chosen their camp since for comparison the Ethereum Classic had a hashrate of 234.56 TH/s on September 16th and peaked at 310.5 TH/s the day before. For more information on this topic, I invite you to read this article that summarizes the current state of Ethereum Classic.
Eric Wall, Chief Investment Officer of Arcane Assets, said that ETHPoW miners cannot continue to mine the chain at current ETHW prices. He added:
“Daily rewards are 13100 ETH, or $354k instead of $20m. There is no way miners will continue to mine the ETHPoW chain no matter how you adjust the difficulty. There is not enough reward in the system to pay the electricity bills.“
Others decide move towards RavenCoin, the Hashrate of this one tripled in just 2 days. It went from 6.84 TH/s on September 14 to 17.85 TH/s today.
So miners are looking for new cryptos to warm up their machines and it is very likely that we will see more migrations in the coming days. In fact, miners prioritize profitability and Ethereum has been one of the most profitable.
