Largest Ethereum mining pool will not back PoW forks of the network

The largest mining pool on the Ethereum network stated that it would not support any of the potential forks based on the Proof-of-Work algorithm (PoW).

“After seven long years of research and development, the Ethereum mining phase will end on September 15, 2022. After that date, ether cannot be mined using GPUs or ASIC miners,” the statement said.

After the merge, the platform will switch to withdrawal-only mode. All Stratum servers of the Ethereum pool will be disabled.

According to the statement, the operator of the Bitfly blockchain service has reached the decision “after careful consideration”.

Ethermine will invite miners to mine one of the other cryptocurrencies:

• Ethereum Classic (ETC);
• Ravencoin (RVN);
• Ergo (ERGO);
• Beam (BEAM).

To incentivize miners, the service will zero out the fees in the pools of these coins for September.

In late July, miner Chandler Gu proposed launching a fork of Ethereum that would continue to operate on the PoW algorithm. The new network is intended to enable miners to continue mining after the main blockchain’s transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS).

Bob Summerwill, head of ETC Cooperative, which is leading the development of the Ethereum Classic ecosystem, in an open letter to Gu questioned the feasibility of the fork and the prospects for the new network if it goes ahead. He urged supporters of the project to join mining ETC.

Developers of Ethereum PoW (ETHW) described the fork as an “inevitable response” to the community and miners’ requests. Among their objections to Summerwill’s arguments, they noted that the Ethereum Classic network simply cannot accommodate the released power, which exceeds its hash rate by an order of magnitude.

Analysts at JPMorgan have suggested that ETC would be the main beneficiary of the influx of miners after Ethereum’s transition to PoS.

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