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By CNBCTV18.com Sept 19, 2022 10:08:16 PM IST (Published)
ETHW surged more than 70 percent, going from $35.4 on the morning of September 15 to $60.68 after The Merge. It was a good sign for ETHPoW's future. However, one must also remember that ETHW was valued at almost $139 when it was first listed on CoinMarketCap. Therefore, despite the recent price rally, ETHW was nowhere near its all-time high.
After years of anticipation, the Ethereum Merge finally went live on September 15. The network's transition from the power-hungry proof-of-work consensus mechanism to its energy-efficient proof-of-stake counterpart went through without any hiccups. As a result, Ethereum's overall power usage currently sits at 2,600-megawatt hours per year, a negligible amount compared to 23 million megawatt hours before The Merge.
However, the switch to PoS was bad news for ETH miners, who lost a major revenue stream after The Merge rendered mining activities obsolete. To avoid financial losses, some ETH miners put their mining rigs to work on other PoW blockchains, such as Ravencoin, Ethereum Classic and Ergo. Another group of individuals decided to continue mining ETH after The Merge, effectively creating a hard fork of the network.
This new offshoot of the Ethereum network was dubbed ETHPOW, with ETHW as its native cryptocurrency. However, the network hasn't gotten off to a perfect start, thanks to significant technical difficulties. The price of ETHW has also tanked since then, and the future of the PoW hard fork looks dicey.