Ethereum [ETH] and its upcoming network update ‘The Merge’ seems to be a prominent topic of discussion. While some continue to suggest that it would be revolutionary for the entire crypto ecosystem, a few others were hoping for a delay. ETH miners belonged to the latter. The Merge is scheduled to take place in September and would transition the network into Proof-of-Stake [PoS] further negating the need for miners. Since it affects their livelihood, some of them have raised their concerns and taken action.
Chandler Guo, a prominent Chinese crypto miner seems to be leading this rebellion. Guo took to Twitter last week and announced that he would fork the Ethereum blockchain to “ETH POW.” This would further allow miners to continue mining following ‘The Merge.‘ While Guo seemed to be confident about the hard fork, Justin Sun, the founder of the Tron network wanted to be the first one on the ship.
In a recent tweet, his recently acquired exchange, Poloniex confirmed that it would list both ETHW and ETHS in case of an Ethereum hard fork. With this, the exchange became the first to do so.
In addition to this, Sun revealed that if the hard fork proves to be a success, he would go on to donate the forked assets to the Ethereum community. He tweeted,
“We currently have more than 1 million #ETH. If #Ethereum hard fork succeeds, we will donate some forked #ETHW to #ETHW community and developers to build #ethereum ecosystem.”
It should be noted that no prominent protocol on Ethereum has extended support just yet.
Additionally, Justin Sun’s stablecoin USDD would act as the very first stablecoin of the ETHW ecosystem.
What are the chances of an Ethereum hard fork?
On one hand, Guo remains immensely bullish about the occurrence of a hard fork.
It should be noted that Guo was involved in the 2016 Ethereum fork.
A recent Twitter poll conducted by Galois Capital, on the other hand, suggested otherwise. More than half of the participants believed that Ethereum would have a smooth transition to PoS.
However, 33.1 percent of the 4,277 voters were still inclined towards a hard fork. A majority of them pointed out that the existence of Ethereum Classic [ETC] an already forked, proof-of-work [PoW] version of Ethereum would suffice. Therefore, ETHW wouldn’t attract as many users.
In addition to this, the chances of traders dumping ETHW or ETH1 were high. Therefore, the community speculates that the likelihood of ETHW thriving or the occurrence of the hard fork was on the lower side.