After the merge, the Ethereum POW will undergo a hard fork from the mainnet. This fork is slated to be 24 hours after the Ethereum mainnet has transitioned to the POS consensus. This hard fork is a permanent diversion from the mainnet due to the incompatibility after the merge.

Information On The ETH POW Hard Fork

The ETHW, the team in charge of the hard fork, disclosed to the public that vital information about the network would be disclosed once the time is up. And a countdown timer would inform users of when the hard fork would begin.

This hard fork would take off with 2048 blocks added to the total merge block. The sum of these blocks would be the starting block to record transactions on the ETH POW network. The team stated that this would take off at a hash rate of 150TH/s.

Reports say this Ethereum POW hard fork is a backup plan for the slated POS transition. If the Proof of Stake doesn’t work out, the network could easily fall back to the POW. 

Many strongly opposed this saying that the Proof of Stake had no room for miners. As a result, miners had to fork from the Ethereum mainnet to continue their POW mining activities.

However, the POW would be at a disadvantage if POS transition goes well, and the ETH price pumps. This would cause less traction and activities on the POW network.

Reactions To the ETH POW Hard Fork News

There have been different reactions to this news. Some congratulated the team and called it ETH 3.0. However, there were a lot of bearish comments about this fork. 

Some exchanges have shown support for this ETHW hard fork, including gate.io and CoinW. They communicated that if the fork is successful, they will enable swapping and trading on their platforms.

Coinbase called the attention of the ETHW team to the chainID in their network. This chainID has the same number as the Ethereum mainnet transitioning to POS. 

Without changes, this would confuse users and exchanges. It would make it difficult to differentiate between the main network and POW network. 

The ETHW team addressed this issue that the forked POW network would retain this same chainID. This particular chain ID is necessary to validate chain data before and after the merge.

The timing for this fork is dependent on the merge. It would need to start from the last block height of the merge before it is launched.