The Ethereum Merge officially took place yesterday and right after the said landmark event, the proof of work forked version’s mainnet also went live. Top Ethereum miners have already launched their ETHW mining pools.
In an official release yesterday, F2Pool said that the remaining hashrate in its ETH pool had been redirected to its ETHW mining pool. The said miner had, notably, mined the last block on Ethereum before the Merge took place.
Furthermore, Antpool had also told that it had “officially launched” its ETHW mining pool and added that it will “continue to provide 24/7 stable mining services.” In fact, in a recent blog post, ETHW listed 23 mining pools supporting ETHW mining.
Ethereum PoW starts off on a rocky note
Despite the launch happening on time, it seems like the Ethereum Proof of Work network has started off on the wrong foot. A host of people tweeted stating that they tried adding the new chain to Metamask, but it couldn’t get through.
Another particular user went on to highlight that the ETHW chain uses the same ID as the Bitcoin Cash Testnet. Chain IDs, on their part, help blockchains verify the unique identity of on-chain assets, and more or less, act like fingerprints.
Alongside, users also pinpointed that the web server of the Ethereum PoW network was down right after the main-net went live.
As if all this was not enough, the Ethereum PoW forked version’s native token ETHPoW noted a dramatic fall. Yesterday at this time, the token was trading at a level as high as $60.68. Notably, prominent exchanges like BitFinex and FTX had already added the ETHW Fork IOU token on their respective platforms. Post trading at highs, however, the token’s value kept tumbling With a 24-hour trading volume of $63,514,687, it was trading at merely $13 at press time—down by around 70% in the past 24 hours.
