Ethereum post-Merge hard forks are here: Now what?

On the first day after the Merge, the decentralized finance (DeFi) community is settling into the seemingly uneventful transition of the Ethereum network from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS). However, it has yet to be seen the benefits that hard forks will bring to PoW supporters.

So far, the most important contending networks in favor of the mining community, EthereumPoW and Ethereum Classic, have shown different outcomes post-Merge.

A stumbling start

The fledgling EthereumPoW started its debut with Twitter users reporting issues with accessing the network. The issues were confirmed to be the result of a hack to the network but was reportedly resolved.

Major cryptocurrency exchange OKX has already started providing on-chain data for the new network. Though the current transaction activity of the crypto asset seems stable, the PoW spin-off’s price value has been in constant decay since its launch, going from a price of $137 at its peak to $5.87 at publishing time, according to CoinMarketCap.

Moving forward, there is no clear infrastructure or roadmap plan for the ETHPoW network. The project’s “meme” white paper, displayed on its website, is 10 pages long, with five of them solely dedicated to the title of the project and the remaining five “intentionally left blank.” The prank document is also accompanied by a GitHub repository with merely 16 contributions since August this year, and no further information is provided on the section of EthereumPoW official documents.

ETC’s revival

The cryptocurrency Ethereum Classic (ETC) could see a turnaround in its struggle to lift off, as the community could shift to the six-year-old project.

Originally created in 2016, the existence of Ethereum Classic is the result of one of the biggest philosophical divisions in the Ethereum community. The fork originated as a solution to the hack of The DAO, a project executing on the Ethereum network.

The DAO was an early iteration of a decentralized autonomous…