Last week, Chandler Guo, a prominent Chinese cryptocurrency miner, announced his opposition to The Merge update. The miner proposed to Ethereum hard fork, splitting the network and maintaining mining via Proof of Work (PoW).
With that, Guo advocated the creation of EthereumPOW (ETHW), the version of the network that will maintain the current mining consensus. And Tron creator Justin Sun announced that Guo’s proposal has his support.
In addition, the Poloniex exchange also supported the ETHW this Friday (5), and went further. According to the company, if the split occurs, users will be able to trade the token on the platform.
Therefore, Poloniex stated that it intends to support what would be a “consensus war” on the second largest blockchain in the world. After all, The Merge intends to change the ETH mining algorithm to Proof of Stake (PoS).
Poloniex supports Ethereum Hard Fork
Currently, Ethereum works on a PoW model that allows so-called miners to create ETH by directing massive amounts of computing power. In this sense, the network works with the same algorithm used by Bitcoin.
However, the developers believe that PoS will bring more advantages to ETH and less impacts to the environment. Therefore, they intend to use the new algorithm to make the blockchain faster and more scalable, that is, with support for more transactions.
But The Merge would end the mining practice, a blow to miners like Guo. It is for this reason that he and others are trying to launch ETHW, to allow individuals to continue mining a form of ETH. And Poloniex decided to side with the miners.
Via Twitter, the exchange said it will “fully support the ETH upgrade and its hard fork potential.” And support will start early: from August 8, the exchange will allow users to trade ETH for ETHW and vice versa.
Each ETH will be worth 1 ETHW at this first moment of trading. Poloniex will also list ETHS, a cryptocurrency representing ETH with PoS enabled. It should be noted that the developers’ forecast is to implement The Merge only on September 19th.
If on this date, ETH implements The Merge without any problems, Poloniex will automatically convert all ETHS to ETH. ETHW will turn into a separate token if Guo and his followers manage to split the ETH network. Otherwise, Poloniex will suspend and delete ETHW from its platform.
Justin Sun defends Proof of Work
Poloniex’s main investor is Justin Sun, CEO of Tron. And when the exchange broke the news, Sun also took a stand for Guo and his group.
On twitter Sun defended PoW as a mining engine and claimed that ETH owes much of its expansion to the engine.
“We have witnessed the consensus mechanism [PoW] as a key factor driving the expansion of the ETH ecosystem. And we are willing to continue to support the development of the community,” said Sun.
Supporting large platforms is one of Guo’s initial goals on his journey. Even if he manages to accomplish the split, ETHW would be an entirely separate network from ETH. That is, it would have no value. To grow, the network will need to find developers, market and users.
In this regard, Poloniex and Justin Sun’s support provides much-needed credibility. But it is unlikely that the network will be able to garner substantial support to grow and become a competitor to ETH.
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