The EthereumPoW (ETHW) team, which briefly captured the attention of the crypto markets, has made a significant announcement. During Ethereum‘s transition to Proof of Stake (PoS), the network forked, leading to a group of developers and miners supporting the continuation of the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism. At that time, even fake ETHW tokens were spotted in circulation.
Wallets holding Ethereum received PoW version ETHW tokens after the Merge. The team faced criticism, with many doubting the token’s long-term viability. Some investors, speculating on its future appreciation, bought the fork token at high prices.
Justin Sun attempted to profit from the situation by initially supporting ETHW and then its alternatives. However, ETHW is currently struggling to survive, with a price of $2.78 and a market cap of $288 million, a steep fall from its peak price of $141 on August 8, 2022.
The situation worsened when major exchanges did not list ETHW pairs, and now the core development team is being dissolved. This move, announced as a step towards decentralization, caused the price to drop from $2.83 to $2.6 shortly after the announcement.
The announcement stated that the core team had worked diligently to fulfill commitments made during the initial fork and had confirmed the feasibility of ETHW operating independently without the core’s support. The consensus was to dissolve the core development organization to achieve full autonomy, maintain PoW as the network’s fundamental consensus, and adopt decentralized governance to become an ownerless, non-centrally managed public network. The current servers will be temporarily transferred to OneDao for maintenance until long-term ecological partners are determined. Despite these changes, the future of ETHW remains uncertain, especially when compared to Ethereum (ETH) in terms of community, ecosystem, developer support, and transaction power. It appears that ETHW may not achieve success even with its latest move.