Which ETH Fork Are You Holding? Are These Forks Valuable?

6 min readSep 17, 2022

$ETHW has most of the support from mining pools, and it seems like the ‘real fork’, while $ETF has been pre-mined with 13 million $ETF and most of them are controlled by the team who initiated the fork.

Centralized exchanges have listed many Ethereum PoW Fork IOU trading products during these Merge days.
But none of us clearly know which $ETHW fork we are buying or holding.
This article will help you understand how many ETH PoW forks are currently preparing to launch and different crypto exchanges listing rules for those ambiguous ETHW IOU assets.
The $ETF fork is extremely risky for the normal user, the team behind it holds over 8 million $ETFs and it is clearly a fork backed by a Chinese exchange background

EthereumPoW (By miners)

Links: https://linktr.ee/ethw

Starting from July 2022 (at least they create their Twitter account and discord channel in July) with their official website is https://EthereumPoW.org/ EthereumPoW is a PoW consensus fork of Ethereum network launched by a group of miners community, maybe Chinese as the majority because they use Mandarin as their first manifesto language.

This one is pretty info complete (41k Twitter followers + 1k+ online discord members) and relatively speedy. Already launched the mainnet now.

EthereumPoW’s official twitter retweeted CEXes’ or protocols’ ETHW supported tweets include:

Mathwallet, with EthereumPoW’s logo pinned (Sep 16th)
KyberNetwork, with EthereumPoW’s logo pinned (Sep 16th)
Bitrue, with EthereumPoW’s logo pinned (Sep 16th)
Dexscreener, no logo but been @, and Dexscreener’s page specifically noted the price is from FTX’s ETHW. (Sep 16th)
Kraken, with EthereumPoW’s logo pinned (Sep 16th)
Bybit, with EthereumPoW’s logo pinned (Sep 16th)
OKX, with EthereumPoW’s logo pinned (Sep 16th)
MEXC, no logo within the tweet (Sep 16th)

According to the manifesto, EthereumPoW is actually anti-Ethereum Foundation, accusing that the foundation is way too centralized.

They have committed to 5 following principles:

No pre-mint, totally fair launch.
PoW is the basic consensus in the long term.
Abandon EIP 1559, and recover all original rewards for miners.
Decentralized governance.
Discard the governance team in the following 3 years.

What they have done now?

Aug 17, they decided to freeze main LPs pools’ ETHW liquidity in major protocols to protect assets from being swapped right after the fork from hackers using very cheap stablecoins. (3 batches of freeze addresses being released in the following week)
Aug 26, 1st Testnet Iceberg got released, includes both codes, RPC info, and Faucet to claim.
Sep 14, they released their 23 mining pools websites.

Worth noting Mining Pools:

f2Pool, Poolin, BTC.com, Ethwmine (cooperated with the community, with long-term services)

… After Merge…

Sep 16, ETHW mainnet Launched.

EthereumPoW Mainnet RPC Info (Here you can check you real airdrop)

Network Name: ETHW-mainnet
New RPC URL: https://mainnet.ethereumpow.org
Chain ID: 10001
Currency Symbol: ETHW
Block Explorer URL(Optional): https://mainnet.ethwscan.com
Block Explorer URL(Optional): https://www.oklink.com/en/ethw

Ethereum Fair (ETF as the token)

Ethereum Fair (ETF) is another fork after The Merge. ETF officials made the announcement TODAY, with many ‘strategies’.

The ETF project ‘redistributes’ 13+ million ETH that was transferred to the PoS Beacon Chain to the entire community and ecosystem (In other words, those ETH were confiscated and controlled by the team).
4 million $ETF will be distributed to the top 10 mining pools in 50 weeks
2 million $ETF will be given to exchanges (for listing $ETF token)
5 million $ETF will be kept in a DAO
1 million $ETF will be airdropped to ClassZZ community
1 million $ETF will be kept for operation and community expenditure

By the time of writing, Huobi, Poloniex, Gate, and BitCoke have listed $ETF. Without any surprise, those are all Chinese-based exchanges. Since Poloniex was the first exchange that claimed to support ETF, Justin Sun is no doubt behind this.

If we don’t count the ETF that will be airdropped to Miners and ClassZZ community, the team behind this fork still controls an 8 million $ETF.

For more information, please check https://tokeninsight.com/en/coins/ethereumfair/overview

CEXes Listing ETHW IOU product

A lot of centralized exchanges list ETHW representative coin (ETHW Fork IOU coin, in our term) for users to acquire the airdrop of ETH while they can also hold their ETH in the CEX’s account.

In the traditional finance market, the acronym IOU stands for “I owe you” and refers to an informal document that acknowledges a debt one party owes to another.
Here IOU simply refers to exchanges self-listed trading products underlying their own rules. So keep in mind to read those rules, they may differ a lot for different platforms.

FTX , the most complete Merge service

Before the Merge happened, FTX officially announced detailed service rules for ETH merge. It is long but we summarized key info as follows:

Airdrop snapshot (Sep 15, 6:15am UTC)
FTX’s definition for their ETHW IOU coin: ETHW is a token representing the canonical potential PoW ETH fork.

Borrowers will be charged (negative airdrop)
FTX reserves the right to update the treatment of any forked PoW ETH at any time.
FTX will evaluate the listing of the forked PoW ETH at a later date.

Gate, renamed ETH into ETHS and ETHW first, delisted the ETHS later

Gate directly firstly re-named the current main ETH into ETHS (Ethereum PoS) and other ETH fork IOU as ETHW. Below is the official announcement for those assets.

Gate.io fully supports the Ethereum Merge and the potential hard fork. It has already enabled users to swap ETH into the two potential fork tokens, ETHS and ETHW, at a 1:1 ratio. Meanwhile, users can also swap ETHS & ETHW back into ETH anytime before the ETH 2.0 merge.

After Merge, Gate gave its official definition of its IOU ETHW coin, and delisted ETHS:

On September 15. Gate.io users have now been credited the PoW chain split token ETHW (which does not indicate a specific token, but a symbol to represent the winning Ethereum PoW chain split token), based on their eligible ETH balances on September 15, at 06:30, UTC at a ratio of 1:1.

Meanwhile, Gate also listed Ethereum Fair (ETF):

OKX, Supports margin trading on ETHW!

OKX not only listed ETHW fast, but also supports OKX wallet and OKX DEX to ETHW. However, we still do not know which ETHW fork it supports because there are no RPC links or other information to judge the correctness.

OKX gave the airdrop to their ETH holders in OKX accounts on Sep 15. Details here.
On Sep 15, OKX wallet announced on The Successful Ethereum Merge Upgrade (The first wallet supports ETHW)
Spot ETHW listing announcement on Sep 16. Details here.
Meanwhile, OKX also supports ETHW margin trading and savings on 7:00 am UTC Sep 16. Details in the link here.

Short End

Keep in mind most of exchanges actually do not determine which fork to be the dominant ETHW yet. Although EthereumPoW.org seems the biggest one but it really hard to say.

Your CEX’s wallet ETHW asset’s price can diverge a lot.