Shane Molidor, in his interview, stated, “Some Ethereum miners may believe it’s in their best interest to fork the newly PoS Ethereum chain back to PoW to keep using their expensive mining hardware. If this were to occur, ETH holders would likely be airdropped ‘PoW ETH’ in addition to their original ETH holdings that merged to PoS.”
The highly anticipated Ethereum Merge will eliminate the Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism and introduce the Proof-of-Work algorithm to the Ethereum network.
The official date has been set to the 15th - 16th of September, following the success of the final Goerli testnet integration to the Beacon Chain on August 11th.
Presently, mining new Ether (ETH) tokens require dedicating a huge amount of computing power. However, after the Merge, network participants - known as Validators - will need to pledge large amounts of previously mined ETH to validate blocks, creating more ETH and earning staking rewards.
The Beacon Chain was launched on December 1, 2020, to kick off the three-phase transition process. The process's Phase 0 marked the beginning of the transition to the Proof-of-Stake consensus when validators began staking their ETH for the first time. However, Phase 0 did not affect the Ethereum mainnet.
Phase 1, which was the integration of the Beacon Chain with the current Ethereum mainnet was scheduled for mid-2021 but was further postponed to early 2022 since the developers did not meet up with the schedule.
Meanwhile, Phase 2 and the final phase of the transition would see the integration of Ethereum WebAssembly or eWASM and introduce other key scalability features, such as sharding,
Several experts on crypto mining have weighed in on the potential result of the Merge. CEO of crypto exchange platform AscendEX, Shane Molidor, believes there is a high chance of forking, with PoW miners already showing interest.
He told Cointelegraph:
“Some Ethereum miners may believe it’s in their best interest to fork the newly PoS Ethereum chain back to PoW to keep using their expensive mining hardware. If this were to occur, ETH holders would likely be airdropped ‘PoW ETH’ in addition to their original ETH holdings that merged to PoS.”
According to an estimate by crypto research group, Messari, the Ethereum mining industry is worth $19 billion.
