Ethereum’s announcement of its transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) from the Proof-of-Work (PoW) protocol did not come as a piece of cheering news for the category of people.
The people whose activities are threatened by the upcoming Merge are the Ethereum miners. As a result, the aggrieved miners are called the ETHPOW group.
The ETHPOW group has announced a new liquidity pool freezing technology that it plans to use after the Merge. The Ethereum miners have set their sights on hardforking the chain post-merge.
What is the Liquidity Pool Freezing Plan?
On their Twitter handle, the ETHPOW group disclosed that they are working on freezing some smart contracts belonging to some lending platforms. The group added that users with ETHW tokens dumped in liquidity pools are prone to hacking after the fork.
Furthermore, pools like Aave, UniSwap, and Compound would have their ETHW tokens compromised. Hackers could easily swap such coins with cloned USDT, USDC, and other stablecoins.
As a result, the ETHPOW is freezing smart contracts of lending pools until the networks can provide better solutions for the assets. Meanwhile, the freeze does not apply to staking arrangements for a single coin. With this, the ETHW core advises users to pull their tokens out of liquidity pools and other lending platforms.
The crypto community has criticized the move and questioned the group’s motives behind the proposed action.
Is a Hardfork on Ethereum a Possibility?
Once the Merge is completed, the entire ecosystem of Ethereum’s network will undergo massive scalability. The transition from the PoW to the PoS consensus mechanism will reduce the network’s energy consumption rate by over 99%.
However, the miners would be the most significant hit as the network would replace them with validators. As a result, the Ethereum miners are looking to halt the transition to the new protocol. The Ethereum mining rig is compatible with other crypto mining as GPU-powered mining.
The primary beneficiaries among the miners are the Ethereum Classic miners. Others are betting their funds against the PoS transition even as the merge inches closer. Notable mining firms like Bitmain and Innosilicon are actively increasing their Ethereum mining capacity. The general belief among miners is to adopt the wait-and-see approach as others are not ready to accept the upcoming circumstances.
The next destination for the miners would be to move to Ethereum Classic, which still has a PoW chain, or to hardfork the Ethereum network.
A forked network would represent an enormous challenge for Ethereum as it would disrupt the decentralization drive of the platform. The hardfork will tie the centralized platforms and cross-chain bridges to the Ethereum protocol, which was not the development team’s focus.
There is a high chance that some established blockchain platforms would recognize the Ethereum fork, given the frenzy with which it is discussed in the industry.
Pressure is mounting on the aggrieved miners to drop the Ethereum hardfork, which might make it lose relevance.
