A number of big Ethereum mining pools are expected to support EthereumPoW (ETHW) following the merge, the new asset’s developers confirmed today.
According to a series of tweets from the ETHW account, major pools such as F2Pool, Poolin, and BTC.com will support ETHW mining, which is expected to commence following a planned hard fork. A few hours later, Nanopool also announced that it would also participate.
Mining pools are groups of crypto miners who share their resources so that other miners can work with them and have a better chance of processing a transaction, and thus sharing in the spoils.
Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency, is moving over to proof of stake in a long-anticipated transition known as the merge. This will eliminate the need for miners, as validators will replace them in keeping the network secure and process transactions.
It is hoped the move will make the network greener. Proof-of-work blockchains—like Bitcoin—are notoriously energy-intensive. A proof-of-stake consensus mechanism eliminates the need for industrial operations that use lots of electricity to keep the network running.
But prominent Chinese miner Chandler Guo last month launched a campaign to oppose the merge because those who previously mined Ethereum could potentially be left with useless rigs.
To save these operations, Guo and other developers proposed a new cryptocurrency via a hard fork which would still use proof-of-work mining. And today’s news confirms that there is wider support for the move.
“In addition to the major mining pools (F2Pool, Poolin, BTC.com, etc.) that have confirmed their support of ETHW mining, some new pools are also doing mining tests based on data from our testnet,” today’s tweet said.
It added that the ETHW community had also partnered with backup mining pool EthwMine.
Meanwhile, a number of major exchanges—including Coinbase and Binance—have said they would not rule out listing ETHW.
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