After the transition from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS), the Ethereum community saw two new PoW Ethereum forks, Ethereum PoW and Ethereum Fair have been launched. Over the past four months, the value of both coins has dropped from 94.8% to 98.4% in US dollar terms.
PoW Ethereum forks Ethereumpow and Ethereumfair suffer significant value losses after launch
Two Ethereum forks that use the new Proof of Work (PoW) consensus algorithm have suffered significant value losses since their launch in September 2022. Ethereum itself made the transition from PoW to proof-of-stake (PoS) on September 15, 2022, called “The Merge.” Since then,ETHhas dropped 25.62% in value, falling from $1635 to $1216 per coin.
The two forks that followed Ethereum’s transition to PoS have since underperformed, losing 94.8% to 98.4% of their value. Ethereum PoS (ETHW) is currently trading at $3.08 per unit, down from an all-time high of $58.54 on September 3, 2022.ETHW’s price was calculated before the chain went live, as some exchanges offered IOU markets before the fork.
In addition to a 94.8% drop in dollar terms, ETHW has lost 19.8% of its value over the past month. In the past two weeks, however, ETHW has shown some improvement, increasing in value by 4.3%; as of January 3, 2023, ETHW is in 94th place among the top 100 tokens by market capitalization, with an overall market valuation of approximately $326.4 million.
In addition to the price decline over the past four months, the network’s hash rate has dropped from 68.17 terahashes per second (TH/s) to 16.99 TH/s, a 75.07% loss since The Merge took place. Currently, the top two mining pools for ETHW are F2pool and 2miners; Ethereumfair (ETHF) is a lesser-known Ethereum fork that has not been assigned a rank on coingecko.com.
Ranked 2,736th out of 22,174 tokens listed on coinmarketcap.com on January 3, 2023, ETHF is down 98.4% from its all-time high of $20.59 on September 16, 2022. Global trading volume over the past 24 hours was $657,438, making Gate.io the top exchange for ETHF trading volume.
There has been little mention of these Ethereum Forks in the past 4 months, and Google Trends data shows a marked drop in interest since “The Merge.” The search term “Ethereum Fork” had a score of 100 for the week of September 11-17, 2022, but has now dropped to 4.
The same trend can be seen for the search term “ETHW,” which scored 100 that week but now barely maintains a score of 4. Conversations about these forks are also low on forums such as Twitter and Reddit. The lower prices and lack of interest suggest that these two new proof-of-workETHforks are slowly losing relevance.
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