The Ethereum network has finally transitioned from its consensus model through The Merge. As a result, Proof of Work (PoW) mining ceased to exist as of block 15,537,393. However, the historic event on Thursday (15) did not reduce demand for mining. So much so that this Friday (16), the hard fork of EthereumPoW (ETHW) took place. This network has ex-miners who want to keep mining – and protect their income. A day before the implementation of The Merge, the EthereumPoW team revealed a list of all mining pools that will support ETHW mining. And the list of pools is huge and involves big names in the market. In total, EthereumPoW will be supported by 23 pools at the time of writing. Some of them are the most prominent pools on the market like F2Pool, Poolin, AntPool, BTC.com and others. ETHW developers also confirmed that some new pools were running test mining based on testnet data. Therefore, if ETHW meets expectations, more pools will be able to join mining.
The importance of pools
Pools are structures that bring together miners of a particular cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin (BTC), for example. Within a pool, miners work together to find the blocks of each cryptocurrency. If a miner in the pool finds a block, the pool divides the total amount of the reward among the miners in the pool according to the processing power each miner contributed. Soon, all miners end up earning part of the reward. Pools are more efficient for miners than solo mining as they provide yields more often. Each of the biggest cryptocurrencies on the planet has multiple pools of miners gathered together.
Largest Ethereum pool denies support
Although ETHW has support from many pools, Ethermine, Ethereum’s largest pool, is off the list. As CriptoFácil reported, the pool stopped offering mining services after The Merge. Instead, the pool will have an ETH-only staking service and no mining. The miner who enters Ethermine will only have the function of withdrawing the Ether (ETH) mined before The Merge. As per the announcement, all Ethermine servers are down and the pool will switch to a withdrawal-only mode. However, Ethermine users will still be able to mine other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum Classic (ETC) and Ravencoin (RVN). After The Merge, miners will be replaced by validators in charge of keeping the network secure and processing transactions, a move many miners have opposed. Led by Chinese miner Chandler Guo, the group even launched a campaign to oppose The Merge, but it was unsuccessful. That’s why Guo joined forces with other developers to propose a new cryptocurrency through a hard fork. Also read: Yuga Labs would be working on a new collection of the Bored Apes universe, says source Also read: Post-Merge Centering? Data shows that two ETH addresses dominated 46% of nodes Read also: US advances in digital dollar project
