The cohort of miners preparing to fork Ethereum has released a timeline.
Dubbing their project “ETHPoW” with token “ETHW,” the group tweeted that “ETHW mainnet will happen within 24 hours after the merge. The exact time will be announced one hour before launch with a countdown timer.”
“The mainnet will start at the block height of the Merge block ‘plus’ 2048 EMPTY blocks as padding,” the EthereumPoW Twitter account wrote. “Therefore, the Merge block + 2049 will be the 1st block on ETHW that may contain any transactions. Block rewards for the empty blocks will be directed to the 1559 multi-sig wallet.”
This means that the EthereumPoW chain will begin processing transactions 2,049 blocks after the merge, if all goes as the group plans.
Following the Tweet thread on Tuesday morning, EthereumPoW’s controversial token shot up 58% in 24 hours, hitting $45.21, before falling back to $29.98.
The Ethereum merge is slated to complete on Thursday, according to estimates. If all goes as planned, the upgrade will shift Ethereum from a proof-of-work consensus mechanism to proof of stake, dramatically reducing its environmental impact.
The merge effectively eliminates Ethereum mining, leaving these miners without a source of income. Some miners have spent tens of thousands of dollars on equipment, seeking long-term financial stability, and aren’t willing to go down without a fight.
That’s why, post-merge, miners hope to fork—a blockchain split of sorts—Ethereum to try to continue a proof-of-work chain to retain their livelihood—no matter how long the odds.
After all, the value of Ethereum proper, and its native cryptocurrency Ether, will have nothing to do with the fork. Several prominent projects, like Uniswap Labs and stablecoin giants such as Circle and Tether, have pledged support for the post-merge Ethereum proof-of-stake chain.