In September 2022, Ethereum is scheduled to start ETH 2.0's merge upgrade. To mitigate the risks caused by market volatility during the hard fork and safeguard users' assets, Gate.io temporarily listed two versions of $ETH. $ETHS (ETHPoS) represents the token for the new PoS (proof-of-stake) chain. $ETHW (ETHPoW) represents the token for the PoW (proof-of-work) chain that will potentially continue to exist.
If the ETH2.0 ends up with more than one chain, $ETHS will be automatically converted into the upgraded $ETH at a 1:1 ratio and the $ETHS will be delisted, and the PoW chain with the most hashrate will serve as the main chain of $ETHW. Gate.io will also support PoW chain resulting from the hard fork, and rename $ETHW in case the community requires us to do. But if this hard fork ends up failing, $ETH will be automatically converted into the updated $ETH, and the $ETHS and $ETHW will be delisted all together.
How does the airdrop work?
It is actually not an airdrop. With the ETHW hard fork, all addresses that have ETH on the Ethereum network, will have the equivalent number of ETHW on the EthereumPoW network. Remember in the old DeFi Summer days, you can simply switch to a new network by adding its RPC info? So just wait for the mainnet, your ETHW will show up once you add ETHW RPC to your wallet, as long as your wallet has ETH at the time of the fork.
What’s the best practice with my ETH before the fork?
If you would like to get any forked ETH -
WITHDRAW ETH from:
- CEX (those not yet support even IOU of any forked ETH);
- liquidity pools of DEX, lending protocol;
- bridges (to other chains and L2s);
- eth2.0 staking contract (wish they could let ppl withdraw one day);
- anywhere else that you do not have DIRECT control, eg. ETH kept in some custodian wallets that you do even not have the PRIVATE KEY to;
- some users may even choose to convert their expensive NFTs to ETHs, DYOR.
RULE OF THUMB — Only keep the ETH in the wallets that you have the private key to, or your trusted institutes that are guaranteed to give you all the forked ETH you deserve ON TIME (right after the fork, and we are not aware of any institutes that would as of now). Of course, your ETH has to be on the Ethereum mainnet.
What’s your contract address?
ETHW is a native token of a public chain, not an ERC20 token, hence no contract address per se.
What wallet to use?
Any wallet that supports custom RPC.
What’s the supply of ETHW?
Same as ETH.
How about mining algorithm, block size, dag size, EIP-1559, difficulty bomb?
Trying to make minimum changes to keep the PoW-based Ethereum, with chain sustainability in mind, thus most will be kept the same.
So far, the difficulty bomb is disabled and the EIP-1559 base fee will be initially governed by miners, the core, and the community who care about ETHW, to cover ETHW infrastructure cost and the rest will be distributed to miners.
The Core plans to support 4G DAG size later.
There is no plan to make the mining algorithm to be ASIC-resistant.
Again please always refer to the official channels for announcements of any changes.
How to contribute?
Join the discussion in our community, even be a mod.
Code reviews and Core code pull requests.
Run a node, be it a full node or archive node.
To launch a project on EthereumPoW.
The donation address is in the official links list.
Do some BD/marketing/PR work for ETHW.
The whole project is donation based and almost everywhere needs some volunteers if you want to lend a hand.