The closer the merger day gets, the more the cryptocurrency community is discussing the possibility of splitting the Etherium blockchain in a hardforward process. This scenario will happen if a large enough portion of miners do not accept the transition and want to mine ETH in the old blockchain.

The transition itself is due to take place in the week commencing September 19. That said, the merger in the latest test network for Etherium, called Goerli, will take place between August 6 and 12. Accordingly, a blockchain update is a matter of the near future.

How will Etherium move to Proof-of-Stake?

According to a recent poll published on crypto fund Galois Capital’s page, 53.7 percent of respondents are confident that the transition to PoS will go smoothly. However, nearly a third in the form of 33.1 percent of survey participants believe that the Ethereum blockchain will split into two blockchains – based on the current Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm and based on Proof-of-Stake. Another 13.2 percent expect three different blockchains to emerge, one of which will supposedly be a blockchain with a “complexity bomb” that suggests a gradual increase in the complexity of ETH mining.

Here are the results of the survey, in which more than 4,000 respondents took part.

As a reminder, the "complexity bomb" is a mechanism in the Ethereum blockchain that gradually increases the complexity of a coin's mining to eventually make it uncomfortable to use. The complexity bomb itself is a developer initiative to motivate the move to PoS.

According to Cointelegraph’s sources, such forks during important events in cryptocurrency history are not unprecedented. Moreover, the current Ethereum blockchain is itself the result of such a fork, which took place in 2016 after the DAO hack. The DAO project then raised more than $150 million from investors, but was hacked by hackers due to vulnerabilities in the code.

To compensate investors, the Etherium team decided on a hardforge to return transactions and eliminate the actions of the malicious address. However, not everyone agreed with this decision, so the blockchain split into two separate blockchains. This is how the Ethereum Classic project emerged, which has now become the focus of attention for miners.

The number of active crypto-addresses in the Ethereum Classic network

However, the mere fact that Ethereum Classic exists already speaks to the low probability of a new Ethereum split. First, miners could simply switch to ETC, or find another coin to mine with better profitability rates. Second, a hypothetical PoW blockchain after the merger would not get support from most crypto-enthusiasts, the development team of Etherium itself and major crypto-platforms.

Speaking of mining profitability: the day before, Ethereum Classic coin outperformed Etherium in terms of revenue in dollars per 1 hash of crypto processing power, which means it was more profitable to mine. So a surge in ETC’s popularity is quite realistic by September this year, which in general is already being seen on one scale or another.

Ethereum mining yields per 1 hash of crypto power (red line) and Ethereum Classic (green line)

Ethereum Classic is responding well to Ethereum’s impending transition to PoS: the coin’s price has risen by 200 percent in the last month alone. And that is provoking its further popularity, both among traders and investors, as well as among miners.

Ethereum Classic exchange rate

It should be noted that some blockchain enthusiasts have taken to sowing panic about further updates to Ethereum. In particular, it has been claimed that there is likely to be no Tether USDT based on the new Eth network, as it would allegedly be more convenient for project representatives to use the current PoW version of the blockchain. Tether technical director Paolo Ardoino refuted these rumours. He made it clear that there will be no problems with USDT and that the token will run on the new PoS network.

Twitter users have also made it clear that supporting both versions of the chains in case of a fork, Tether simply won’t be able to. In that case, the USDT balance sheet would double in the world, and for that to happen, the company’s employees would have to find billions of dollars to back the token, since that’s the model it operates on.


We believe that the possible prospect of an Ethereum hardforward during the update does not threaten the project's potential in any way. As Ethereum Classic proved, forks with less popularity could very well exist for years and perform their functions. However, in this case, it is obvious that large projects like Tether USDT will not support PoW network during fork, which means that in such case the capabilities of this branch will be less advanced. Well this will directly affect the demand of users other than miners.

The merger is almost a month and a half away, stay tuned to our millionaires cryptochat. There we will discuss other important developments related to the blockchain and decentralisation industry.