It should be noted that there is less than a day to go before we update Etherium. According to the Watcher platform, the update will take place in approximately 20 hours.

The countdown to the merger on the Etherium network

When will the Ethereum PoS be.

According to Decrypt’s sources, information about the launch details of the project appeared on the official EthereumPoW Twitter account. Here is the relevant developer rejoinder.

The ETHW core network will be launched within 24 hours of the merger. The exact time will be announced one hour before the timed event. The final code, files, node information, RPC, blockchain browser and so on will also be published.

Accordingly, the launch of the Ethereum PoW network after the blockchain update will take place within two days. Since this blockchain will be a fork, the address format and private keys from the current blockchain will also be relevant for the new network. That means ETH holders on non-castodial wallets will be able to get the same amount of coins in the new PoW blockchain, and they will not have to do anything to do so.

The announcement of the PoW fork of Etherium

The merger this week will see the second largest blockchain by market capitalisation move to the Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, which will significantly reduce the cost of power to keep the network running. In this case, miners have two choices: launch their own fork of Etherium or start mining other coins like Ethereum Classic, Ergo or Ravencoin.

Some well-known exchanges like Poloniex, Bitfinex and Coinbase showed interest in a potential fork of ETHW a few weeks ago by launching futures on the coin. True, they have fallen at least 78 per cent in price from their all-time high of $141.36 set on 8 August.

The price of futures for the PoW fork of Etherium

The ETHW core network will have 2048 empty blocks after the merger block. This is a precautionary measure to successfully switch the unique identifier of the blockchain. In addition, the team needs to achieve a longer length of the new blockchain to prevent new forks from appearing.

One of the initiators of the fork is Chandler Guo

Chinese miner Chandler Guo’s team is behind the development of the EthereumPoW project. He published the announcement of the fork back on July 27.

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As Eth’s merger approaches, the topic is generating more and more discussion. For example, independent developer and cryptocurrency enthusiast Udi Wertheimer launched a lively debate within the cryptocurrency community with just one Twitter post the day before. On Monday, he claimed that the model of giving out staking rewards in the Proof-of-Stake system of Etherium is unfair to those who don’t engage in the process.

Udi believes that the steaking reward system in PoS can't be considered a full yield. With staking, the user can do nothing with their locked ETH in the smart contract, and those who don't leave their tokens behind and also maintain the network get nothing in return at all.

Wertheimer’s remark has been responded to by the Etherium community – and that includes cryptocurrency creator Vitalik Buterin. Here’s a translation of Udi’s tweet.

PoS awards are not “profits”. More accurately, they’re not even awards, they’re penalties for those who don’t do the steaking. Fools, you don’t get paid for doing steaking. You just get fined for not doing it. I can’t believe you haven’t figured that out by now.

And here’s Vitalik’s equally witty answer.

In Proof-of-Work, the penalties apply to anyone with a hash rate less than a fraction of the coin supply. In fact, in PoW the penalties are much higher because the profit is always less than the revenue, but you get the point.

Etherium creator Vitalik Buterin

According to Cointelegraph, this debate builds on Wertheimer’s claim that any activity to support the Etherium network other than steaking is not rewarded in any way. Vitalik rightly pointed out that PoW has a similar situation by that logic, because running a full node on a Bitcoin network, for example, doesn’t give a return like mining does either.

Another interesting point of view was posted by Twitter user Jordi Alexander.

If the developers of Ether decide to print more ETH and distribute them to staking participants, it’s not yield, it’s just inflation of tokens at the expense of holders. If they increased the staking fee to 50 percent per annum, does that mean they created a high yield? No. Etherium is good as it is, no need to make shit up.

ETH coin supply growth

While news of the merger will be the main topic of discussion this week, the cryptosphere is full of other interesting developments. For example, the day before, rumours that major US holding company Fidelity Investments is working on allowing its 34.4 million clients to trade Bitcoin began to be hotly debated on Twitter. The announcement was made by Galaxy Digital fund CEO Mike Novogratz, along with several other high-profile personalities.

There hasn’t been an official announcement from Fidelity yet, but during a recent conference in New York, Novogratz hinted that insiders already know about preparations for something very big inside the company.

A little birdie has been tipping me off that Fidelity is going to be actively introducing cryptocurrencies to its customers in the near future. I hope this is true. So we still have demand from institutional players and that keeps the crypto market from going down.

Fidelity Investments

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) ran a note with information that Fidelity is currently “nurturing a plan” to launch Bitcoin trading for its investors on its own brokerage platform.


We believe that the launch of the PoW fork of Etherium is a fairly predictable event. The only question here is how popular the network will be among regular users. Still, as already announced, the issuers of popular stackcoins USDT and USDC will not support this branch, which means it will remain without such coins with a peg to the dollar exchange rate. The same could happen to other well-known projects.

Be that as it may, there are more than enough coins to mine today. Accordingly, miners will have no problem choosing other cryptocurrencies to mine as well.

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