ETHPoW team confirms it will use ChainID 10001 to avoid replay attacks on Mainnet

A member of the Coinbase team had to comment on the ETHPoW GitHub repository to get the team to clarify how the forked chain will be set up. Currently, the repository has not updated the ChainID of the network to one that differs from Ethereum Mainnet.

We’ve reached the point in the ETHPoW saga where the Coinbase protocol team themselves are submitting PRs to the repo to get the chainID issue solved.

And still no response from the team. pic.twitter.com/AhQ3FFWEm4

— frankie (@FrankieIsLost) September 9, 2022

The ETHPoW Testnet uses the ChainID 10002, unused by any other chain. Ethereum Mainnet has a ChainID of 1, and plenty of other numbers are available to the PoW chain.

Coinbase was not the only team attempting to resolve this issue. Four other pull requests are requesting the developers update the ChainID.

The ETHPoW team responded to Coinbase’s pull request on Sept. 9 and said:

“The chainid for ethw is 10001, which we will publish on our Twitter account. The code you mentioned in the above comments has to keep because chainID 1 is needed to validate chain data for blocks before the merge, and all chain data after the merge will be chainID 10001.”

This news will calm the nerves of many within the Ethereum ecosystem in the knowledge that there does not appear to have been malicious intent in not updating the ChainID.

Ethereum PoW and why it matters

A proof-of-work hard fork of Ethereum post-merge has been theorized several times over the past few weeks. Justin Sun, the founder of Poloniex, announced the exchange would support a hard fork of Ethereum by donating up to 1 million $ETHPoW to building a developer community on the new chain.

However, much has been misunderstood about The Merge and the move to proof-of-stake. The main Ethereum chain, known as Mainnet, will continue to run throughout The Merge, with a new consensus layer called the Beacon Chain being merged into the existing network.

A difficulty bomb will be applied, making mining on Mainnet pointless…