Coinbase has officially announced that it will consider the eventual cryptocurrency born with Ethereum’s PoW fork to be listed on its exchange.
Summary
Coinbase considers the new cryptocurrency that will arise from the eventual Ethereum fork
As of today, it is still unknown neither whether the PoW fork of Ethereum will be there, or whether the cryptocurrency that is supposed to be born from this fork will survive.
What is known is that as of September 15, Ethereum is scheduled to move to PoS (Proof-of-Stake), which will inevitably lead sooner or later to the divestment of the current PoW (Proof-of-Work) based blockchain.
However, some node operators and some miners seem to be in favor of trying to keep the old PoW-based blockchain alive or fork the Ethereum protocol to avoid the transition to PoS.
In such cases, a new blockchain would effectively be born, with a new cryptocurrency, given a splitting of the current chain. For now, the eventual new cryptocurrency is called ETHPOW, but it is not yet clear whether it will be born for real, and more importantly, whether it will survive or not.
In fact, Ethereum itself is a protocol born in a fork from an earlier protocol now known as Ethereum Classic (ETC) and based on PoW. ETC will not switch to PoS, so Ethereum nodes and miners who do not want to switch to PoS could simply move to Ethereum Classic. In other words, there seems to be no real need to fork Ethereum to keep its PoW blockchain alive, since an Ethereum-compatible PoW blockchain is already there.
The division of a community
To date, all exchanges had stated that they supported the Merge, or the move of Ethereum to PoS, while Coinbase is the first major exchange to state that it might list the new cryptocurrency that might arise from the eventual fork. Bitfinex had previously expressed similar views, but without explicitly stating that they were considering adding the possible new cryptocurrency.
Meanwhile, the well-known mining pool AntPool, operated by Bitmain, has officially stated that it will not maintain users’ ETH on the PoS chain after the Merge. That is, once the switch to PoS is made, since ETH mining will cease, they will simply return their ETHs accumulated on AntPool to users. They will, however, continue to mine ETC.
The past few days have also seen the 2.6 million ETH burned through last year’s London update. In total, 5.1 million new ETHs were created in the same period, so the net of burned Ethereum supply has increased by 2.5 million ETHs in the past year.
There are now 120 million ETHs in circulation, while a year ago, 117 million. In one year, therefore, the Ethereum supply has increased by about 2.5%.
