Largest Ethereum Mining Pool Won't Support PoW Fork Post Merge

The largest Ethereum ETH/USD mining pool Ethermine doesn’t plan to offer a dedicated mining pool for the planned proof-of-work (PoW) fork.

What Happened: Ethermine said it has decided not to support the proposed PoW chain after careful consideration in an announcement on its website on Thursday.

“Since the start of the Ethereum project, one of the core items was to transition the consensus mechanism to Proof of Stake. After seven long years of research & development, the mining phase of Ethereum will come to an end on the [Sept. 15]. After this date it will no longer be possible to mine Ether on the Ethereum Network using Graphic Cards (GPUs) or ASICs,” stated Ethermine.

“As a consequence of this transition, the Ethermine Ethereum mining pool will switch to withdraw-only mode once the Proof-of-Work mining phase has ended.”

See Also: PROOF OF STAKE VS PROOF OF WORK

Ethermine said it would offer a 0% fee for a month following the Merge for miners who opt to switch to mining other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum Classic ETC/USD and Ravencoin RVN/USD. 

Benzinga’s Take: Ethermine is the largest ETH mining pool accounting for 30.8% of ETH mined. The mining pool signalling support for a proof-of-stake Ethereum is a positive sign for the network to undergo a frictionless transition post Merge.

 Figure: Courtesy of Miningpoolstats

It also considerably lowers the chances that another fork of the ETH network to retain a PoW consensus would sustain. Earlier this month, a group of miners proposed the ETHPoW ETHW/USD blockchain that would fork the ETH chain after the Merge. The ETHW token, which began trading on IOU markets on Aug 8, is down 64% in two weeks.

Price Action: At press time, ETH was trading at $1,845, down 0.14% over 24 hours as per data from Benzinga Pro.