What is EthereumPoW (ETHW)?

Deep Dive

1. Origin and Purpose

EthereumPoW was created on September 15, 2022, as a direct hard fork of the Ethereum blockchain. This event occurred at the exact block height when Ethereum completed "The Merge," transitioning from an energy-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) system to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus. A group of community developers and miners who believed in preserving the original PoW model initiated the fork. Their core purpose was to maintain a version of Ethereum that continues to use mining for security and transaction validation, offering an alternative for those committed to the PoW philosophy (CoinMarketCap).

2. Technology and Consensus

The ETHW network is technically a continuation of the pre-Merge Ethereum chain. It retains the original PoW consensus mechanism, where miners use computational power to solve complex puzzles, validate transactions, and create new blocks. This means the network is secured by physical hardware (mining rigs) rather than staked cryptocurrency. The core development team, known as ETHW Core, aimed to make minimal changes to the original codebase to ensure stability and compatibility for existing decentralized applications (dApps) that might migrate (EthereumPoW).

3. Token and Ecosystem

ETHW is the native token of this new chain, not an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum mainnet. Holders of ETH on the original Ethereum network at the time of the fork received an equivalent amount of ETHW on the new chain. The token is used to pay for transaction fees (gas) on the ETHW network. An ecosystem of exchanges, wallets, bridges, and some dApps has developed around the chain, though its scale and activity are significantly smaller than those of Ethereum mainnet.

Conclusion

EthereumPoW is fundamentally a community-led effort to sustain the proof-of-work version of Ethereum as a distinct blockchain. How will its value proposition evolve as the broader industry continues to develop around proof-of-stake and other consensus models?