On September 13, the team behind EthereumPoW (ETHW), a proof-of-work splinter from the Ethereum Blockchain, announced plans to launch its hardfork soon after the Ethereum Merge on September 15. 

“ETHW mainnet will happen within 24 hours after the Merge,” the @EthereumPow Twitter account posted. “The exact time will be announced 1 hour before launch with a countdown timer, and everything including final code, binaries, config files, nodes info, RPC, explorer, etc. will be made public when the time’s up.” 

The Ethereum merge will remove the need for energy-intensive mining operations, switching the second largest blockchain by market capitalization to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism later this week. This merge has caused a crack in the Ethereum ecosystem as miners— reluctant to surrender their revenue stream—proposed forking Ethereum or beginning to mine other blockchains. 

A few exchanges have expressed interest in or have previously recorded the forked ETHW, including Poloniex, Bitfinex, and Coinbase. ETHW has fallen 49% from its unsurpassed high of $141.36 on August 8 to an ongoing trading worth of $29.52, as per CoinMarketCap. 

As indicated by the @EthereumPoW account, the mainnet will begin 2,048 empty blocks past the Merge block, adding padding to guarantee that the chain—a special identifier to differentiate among blockchains—switches effectively and that the chain is the longest chain of ETHW. 

This offset will likewise forestall copy blocks on both ETH and ETHW. 

“Therefore, the Merge block + 2049 will be the 1st block on ETHW that may contain any transactions,” the account says. 

Chinese crypto miner Chandler Guo, the founder of EthereumPoW, announced the proof-of-work hard fork on Twitter on July 27, 2022. Guo has not yet commented anything regarding any post-merge launch plans.