Get Forked: Ethereum PoW Forks Fall 66% In Just Days

Data shows the Ethereum Proof-of-Work forks have sharply fallen down in the few days following the merge.

According to the latest weekly report from Arcane Research, the ETH PoW forks have performed very poorly against ETH since the merge.

The much talked-about event transitioned Ethereum to a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, essentially obfuscating the use of miners on the network.

However, some communities that were in favor of the old PoW-based system decided to create forks as the merge came approaching.

These new forks still rely on mining for reaching consensus on the network and have therefore naturally attracted the stranded ETH miners.

Here is a chart that shows how some of the most popular forks (ETC, ETHW, and ETF) have compared versus Ethereum in the last five days:

As you can see in the above graph, Ethereum has been struggling since the merge, registering around 17% in negative returns.

The PoW forks, however, have been even worse. ETHW has noted losses upwards of 66%, while ETF investors have been yet deeper into the red with their holdings going down by more than 72% during the period.

The best of this bunch was Ethereum Classic, being down “only” 25% in the last five days. This performance was much better than the other two forks, but still noticeably lower than ETH’s returns.

The report notes that this wasn’t something unpredictable as the forks were expected to struggle with amassing any meaningful adoption and to view almost no significant DeFi activity.

The current selling pressure in these cryptos is likely coming from Ethereum holders selling off their airdrops, as per the report.

ETC saw a large amount of ETH miners connecting to the network, leading to a hashrate, and hence a difficulty, explosion for the coin.

Since Ethereum Classic’s miner revenues are less than $1 million per day, while they were more than $20 million for ETH, mining the crypto isn’t viable on the same scale as ETH’s in the long term.

At the time of writing, Ether’s price floats around $19.1k, down 5% in the last seven days. Over the past month, the crypto has lost 10% in value.

The below chart shows the trend in the price of the coin over the last five days.