The upcoming Merge has created a massive divide among the Ethereum network. While the miners fear losing out on their bread and butter, the developers of the network were yearning to transition into proof-of-stake [PoS]. Therefore, a group led by Chandler Guo, a prominent crypto miner, decided to hard fork the network following the Merge. If this proves successful, there will be two chains, ETHW and ETHS. Despite immense criticism, ETHW seemed to be moving forward.
Earlier today, ETHW Core went on to publish its 2nd code update. With this, the network enforced EIP-155, which will reportedly protect ETHW against replay attacks from ETHS and other forks. Following the update, all transactions must be signed with Chain ID.
In addition to this, the network elaborated on the Ethereum contract freezing feature and tweeted,
“The contract freezing feature has been pulled into a separate branch, and all the integration and testing were done. Whether this feature will eventually be pulled into the main branch will be decided at the Core’s meeting on Sep 1st.”
Last week, the ETHW team rolled out its first code, which focused on removing EIP-1559. This would mean that the base fee was converted to a multi-sig wallet that miners and the community would oversee. Furthermore, the difficulty bomb was also disabled.
The largest Ethereum mining pool, Ethermine, also noted that it wouldn’t be supporting ETHW. Since miners have put forth the hard fork, the news was quite detrimental to the ETHW team. But, untethered by it, they seemed to be rolling out codes for the imminent network.
Ethereum, the Github star
With ETHW and the Merge occurring soon enough, the network activity of Ethereum has been surging immensely. On-chain analytics firm, Santiment shared a chart highlighting how Ethereum had bagged the first spot in its monthly Github development activity.
Over the last couple of days, Ethereum went on to plummet by 15 percent. During press time, the asset was trading for $1,592 with a 1.29 percent hourly surge.