The influential Chinese crypto miner, Chandler Guo, announced his support of a new Proof-of-Work (PoW) version of Ethereum. On August 1, Guo tweeted that a PoW version of Ethereum “is coming soon”. Several days later, a new website called ethereumpow.org was launched, with a white paper of the new network coming soon. Domain statistics from Whois records indicate that the web portal was registered on July 31, 2022, News.Bitcoin.Com revealed.

The idea of the creation of a new chain with its own token to be airdropped to all ETH holders (except those, staking ETH in a deposit smart contract) gained fast traction inside the community. Poloniex was the first exchange to officially support ETHPOW (or ETHW in other versions). It also said that it plans to donate airdropped ETHPOW (approximately 1,000,000) to the ETHPOW community to support its development.

Poloniex was also the first exchange to list Ethereum Classic in 2016. As well, Huobi Global also demonstrated its readiness to list the new token, as far as it complies with obligatory criteria for listing.

On August 7, Poloniex stated it had launched new trading pairs of future ETHS and ETHW tokens.

The Ethereum Merge is scheduled to be activated in September 2022. The upgrade will result in the transition of Ethereum network to Proof-of-Stake.

However, speaking in a closed press conference during South Korea Blockchain Week, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that he believes a PoW hard fork of Ethereum is being pushed by "people who own exchanges trying to make a quick buck."

It's worth noting also that no major protocol on Ethereum currently expresses support of the new PoW chain.

According to the latest Bitmex research, “although the ETHPoW chain may have many technical challenges and its long term viability is in question, its existence may provide an exciting opportunity for traders and speculators in the short to medium term.”

At the same time, there are those in the community who oppose both networks at the same time - both Ethereum on Proof-of-Stake and Ethereum on Proof-of-Work. They note that the true Ethereum network is Ethereum Classic, which refused to hard fork in 2016 to save coins stolen from the DAO, and remained on the original version of Ethereum.