The Ethereum network transition to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism completed on Thursday afternoon eliminated the need for miners, but some ETH miners continue to operate the forks that still support proof-of-work (PoW).
The mining hashrate on Ethereum Classic surged after the Merge, up to all-time high 311.82 terahashes per second (TH/S) about 11 hours post-Merge, 371% higher than a day before the Merge, according to mining statistics website 2Miners.
See related article: Ethereum says Merge upgrade successfully completed, more to come
Ethereum Classic is the unaltered blockchain form the 2016 DAO hack when the Ethereum community disagreed on whether to compensate the affected users on the network. Supporters of compensating for the loss due to hacking formed Ethereum as a hard fork of the blockchain that became Ethereum Classic.
Tokens on Ethereum Classic can be mined with Ethereum ASICs because its hashing algorithm is compatible with Ethereum. It’s an alternative for Ethereum miners to continue the mining business after the Merge.
However, the price of Ethereum Classic’s token, ETC, is not rising along with the hashrate. ETC traded at US$39.72 as of 5 p.m. Hong Kong time, down over 10% in 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.
More forks support mining comes up
After the Merge, two new forks that support the PoW algorithm have emerged. One is ETHPoW, advocated by a former miner from China, Chandler Guo, and the other named Ethereum Fair — it is unclear who advocated for it.
As of Friday, the total hashrate of three Ethereum chains that support mining — Ethereum Classic, ETHPoW and Ethereum Fair — is 304.52 TH/S as of 5 p.m. Hong Kong time, which is about 28.7% of the peak hashrate of Ethereum before the Merge.
See related article: Chandler Guo tells why he is the man who would hard fork Ethereum
About eight hours after the Merge, the fork ETHPoW officially launched its mainnet. The hashrate on the fork surpassed 70TH/S on Friday, and there are currently 28 mining pools participating in mining, according to MiningPoolStats.
Crypto exchanges OKX and Gate.io have announced support for the trading of the token of ETHPoW fork, the ETHW.
However, the price of ETHW has fallen sharply. Its price had fallen over 64% in 24 hours at 5 p.m. Hong Kong time, trading at US$12.86, according to CoinMarketCap.
See related article: As “The Merge” succeeds, rival ETHPoW fork falters
Meanwhile, another fork, Ethereum Fair, is also working. But the miners are less active on this fork — it only reached 1.1 TH/S on Friday 5 p.m. Hong Kong time, though it said on Thursday on Twitter that it has mining pool support from Antpool, F2Pool, BTC.com and Poolin.
Crypto exchange Poloniex, which is backed by Justin Sun, supports Ethereum Fair. The exchange announced on Friday support for the ETF fork and offers the fork’s token ETF to trade by USDD, USDT and ETH.
The price of ETF is fluctuating dramatically. According to CoinMarketCap, its price fell to a daily low of US$17.34 at 2: 15 p.m. Hong Kong time on Friday, down over 14% in half an hour, then rising again to over US$20 after about 15 minutes, according to CoinMarketCap.
