Which ETH Fork You Are Holding? Are These Forks Valuable?

• Centralized exchanges have listed many Ethereum PoW Fork IOU trading products during these Merge days.
• But none of us clearly know which $ETHW fork we are buying or holding.
• This article will help you understand how many ETH PoW forks are currently preparing to launch and different crypto exchanges listing rules for those ambiguous ETHW IOU assets.
• The $ETF fork is extremely risky for the normal user, the team behind it holds over 8 million $ETFs and it is clearly a fork backed by a Chinese exchange background

EthereumPoW

EthereumPoW is a PoW consensus fork of Ethereum started by a community of miners, perhaps most of whom use Chinese, as they use Mandarin as their first declarative language. The launch of the project was announced in July 2022, or at least the creation of their Twitter account and Discord channel in July.

This one is pretty info complete (41k Twitter followers + 1k+ online discord members) and relatively speedy. Already launched the mainnet now.

Projects that have retweeted the official EthereumPoW tweet or explicitly stated their support for EthereumPoW include:

• Mathwallet, with EthereumPoW's logo pinned (Sep 16th)
• KyberNetwork, with EthereumPoW's logo pinned (Sep 16th)
• Bitrue, with EthereumPoW's logo pinned (Sep 16th)
• Dexscreener, no logo but been @, and Dexscreener's page specifically noted the price is from FTX's ETHW. (Sep 16th)
• Kraken, with EthereumPoW's logo pinned (Sep 16th)
• Bybit, with EthereumPoW's logo pinned (Sep 16th)
• OKX, with EthereumPoW's logo pinned (Sep 16th)
• MEXC, no logo within the tweet (Sep 16th)

According to the manifesto, EthereumPoW is actually anti-Ethereum Foundation, accusing that the foundation is way too centralized.

They have committed to 5 following principles:

1. No pre-mint, totally fair launch.
2. PoW is the basic consensus in the long term.
3. Abandon EIP 1559, and recover all original rewards for miners.
4. Decentralized governance.
5. Discard the governance team in the following 3 years.

What they have done now?

• Aug 17, they decided to freeze main LP pools' $ETHW liquidity in major protocols to protect assets from being swapped right after the fork from hackers using very cheap stablecoins. (3 batches of freeze addresses being released in the following week)
• Aug 26, 1st Testnet Iceberg got released, includes both codes, RPC info, and Faucet to claim.
• Sep 14, they released their 23 mining pools websites.

Worth noting Mining Pools:

f2Pool, Poolin, BTC.com, Ethwmine (cooperated with the community, with long-term services)

Sep 16, ETHW mainnet Launched.

EthereumPoW Mainnet RPC Info (Here you can check your real airdrop)

• Network Name: ETHW-mainnet
• New RPC URL: https://mainnet.ethereumpow.org
• Chain ID: 10001
• Currency Symbol: ETHW
• Block Explorer URL(Optional): https://mainnet.ethwscan.com

Ethereum Fair

Ethereum Fair (ETF) is another fork after The Merge. ETF officials made the announcement TODAY, with many 'strategies'.

• The ETF project 'redistributes' 13+ million ETH that was transferred to the PoS Beacon Chain to the entire community and ecosystem (In other words, those ETH were confiscated and controlled by the team).
• 4 million $ETF will be distributed to the top 10 mining pools in 50 weeks
• 2 million $ETF will be given to exchanges (for listing $ETF token)
• 5 million $ETF will be kept in a DAO
• 1 million $ETF will be airdropped to ClassZZ community
• 1 million $ETF will be kept for operation and community expenditure

By the time of writing, Huobi, Poloniex, Gate, and BitCoke have listed $ETF. Without any surprise, those are all Chinese-based exchanges. Since Poloniex was the first exchange that claimed to support ETF, Justin Sun is no doubt behind this.

If we don't count the ETF that will be airdropped to Miners and ClassZZ community, the team behind this fork still controls an 8 million $ETF.

For more information, please check https://tokeninsight.com/en/coins/ethereumfair/overview

CEXes Listing ETHW IOU Product

A lot of centralized exchanges list ETHW representative coin (ETHW Fork IOU coin, in our terms) for users to acquire the airdrop without transferring $ETH back to Ethereum.

In the traditional finance market, the acronym IOU stands for “I owe you” and refers to an informal document that acknowledges a debt one party owes to another.

Here IOU simply refers to exchanges self-listed trading products underlying their own rules. So keep in mind to read those rules, they may differ a lot for different platforms.

FTX, the Most Complete Merge Service

Before the Merge, FTX officially announced detailed service rules for the Merge. It is long but we summarized key info as follows:

• Airdrop snapshot (Sep 15, 6:15 am UTC)
• FTX's definition for their ETHW IOU coin: ETHW is a token representing the canonical potential PoW ETH fork.

• Borrowers will be charged (negative airdrop)
• FTX reserves the right to update the treatment of any forked PoW ETH at any time.
• FTX will evaluate the listing of the forked PoW ETH at a later date.

Gate.io, Renamed $ETH Into $ETHS and $ETHW First, Delisted the $ETHS Later

Gate.io directly firstly re-named the current $ETH into $ETHS (Ethereum PoS) and other ETH fork IOU as $ETHW. Below is the official announcement for those assets.

Gate.io fully supports the Ethereum Merge and the potential hard fork. It has already enabled users to swap ETH into the two potential fork tokens, ETHS and ETHW, at a 1:1 ratio. Meanwhile, users can also swap ETHS & ETHW back into ETH anytime before the ETH 2.0 merge.

After Merge, Gate gave its official definition of its IOU ETHW coin, and delisted ETHS:

On September 15. Gate.io users have now been credited the PoW chain split token $ETHW (which does not indicate a specific token, but a symbol to represent the winning Ethereum PoW chain split token), based on their eligible $ETH balances on September 15, at 06:30, UTC at a ratio of 1:1.

Meanwhile, Gate.io also listed Ethereum Fair(ETF):

OKX, Supports Margin Trading on $ETHW

OKX not only listed $ETHW fast but also supports OKX wallet and OKX DEX to $ETHW. However, we still do not know which Ethereum PoW fork it supports because there are no RPC links or other information to judge the correctness.

• OKX gave the airdrop to their $ETH holders in OKX accounts on Sep 15. Details
• On Sep 15, OKX wallet announced The Successful Ethereum Merge Upgrade (The first wallet supports ETHW)
• Spot ETHW listing announcement on Sep 16. Details
• Meanwhile, OKX also supports ETHW margin trading and savings on 7:00 am UTC Sep 16. Details

Closing Thoughts

Keep in mind most exchanges actually do not determine which fork to be the dominant Ethereum PoW fork yet. Although EthereumPoW.org seems the biggest one, it really hard to say.

The price of $ETHW in different CEXs can diverge a lot.

All risks are from CEXs. Carefully DYOR before taking that.

Good luck in bear.