Largest ETH Mining Pool Will Not Support Ethereum PoW

On one hand, Ethereum is preparing for the much-awaited Merge awaited next month scheduled on September 15. But on the other hand, the detractors, especially the ETH miner community are looking to hardfork the Ethereum blockchain and continue with an Ethereum Proof-of-Work (ETHW) network.

However, the world’s largest ETH mining pool Ethermine has decided that it won’t be offering any dedicated mining pool for the planned PoW network. This means that Ethereum will shut down all Ethereum startum servers, Thus, miners will no longer be able to connect their mining equipment to the Ethermine Ethereum pool. The official announcement from Ethermine reads:

“The Ethermine Ethereum mining pool will switch to withdraw-only mode once the Proof-of-Work mining phase has ended. An accurate countdown timer will be available on the miner dashboard. You can continue to mine Ether until the countdown has reached zero”.

To receive the final payout of the unpaid balance, users need to trigger it through their individual dashboard page. Manual payout requests for miners shall be possible if the unpaid balance exceeds 0.005 ETH.

Ethereum PoW Development

Supporters of the Ethereum PoW have already started their development work. Earlier this week on Monday, August 15, Ethereum PoW team released their first code announcing three major features of the Ethereum PoW version.

1. Disabled the difficulty bomb.
2. EIP1559 changed: the base fee to a multi-sig wallet co-managed by miners and the community.
3. Adjusted the starting mining difficulty of ETHW.

ETHW Core also unveiled its liquidity pool freezing technology. It says that this will help to protect user assets. As the official EthereumPoW channel explains:

Right after the Ethereum PoW hardfork, especially for the initial several blocks, users’ ETHW tokens deposited in the Liquidity Pools, like Uniswap, Susiswap, Aave, Compound, will be swapped or lent out by hackers and scientists using deprecated and valueless USDT, USDC, WBTC, which will create a huge mess to the whole network and community.

Hereby ETHW Core has to make the hard decision to temporarily freeze certain LP contracts to protect users’ ETHW tokens until the protocols’ controllers or communities find a better way to return users’ assets.