ETHPOW Hashrate Drops 25% After Reaching ATH
Key Takeaways
- The ETHW hashrate has dropped by 25% from 80 TH/s to around 60 TH/s.
- The drop came after the launch of the forked blockchain was plagued with technical issues.
- The ETHW token has also dropped to its all-time low.
A portion of the miners who switched their rigs over to the newly-launched EthereumPoW (ETHW) token following the Merge, which has reduced the energy costs for Ethereum staking compared to the prior PoW method, soon left the blockchain after a flurry of technical issues plagued the launch of the forked network.
According to data by 2Miners, the ETHW hashrate fell to around 60 terahashes per second (TH/s) today after reaching an all-time high of over 80 TH/s, representing a drop of 25%.
Hashrate refers to the amount of computational power dedicated to a cryptocurrency network. A higher hashrate means more miners are participating in the network. A higher hashrate also makes a blockchain more resistant to hacks.
Notably, ETHW and other PoW coins are not very profitable for miners in the current market conditions. For instance, the reward for mining an Ethereum Classic block is now around 0.00030658 ETC, approximately 11 cents, according to data from Minerstat.
ETHW is a hard fork of Ethereum that has found significant support among several major crypto miners. The team behind the blockchain announced the launch date of its mainnet yesterday, shortly after the Ethereum Merge was completed.
ETHW Flooded With Technical Issues
Despite all the hype, the launch of the ETHW blockchain was not seamless. After the mainnet went live, several Twitter users complained they had issues accessing the network using the details provided by the official Twitter account of Ethereum PoW Twitter channel.
“Is your chain even running? because I see txs in blocks, but if I send my own, it fails with`already known`, but when trying to get tx status, it’s not found,” one Twitter user said.
Another major problem was with ETHW’s Chain ID of 10001, which is the same Chain ID used by a SmartBCH testnet. Several users, including the SmartBCH team, confirmed the issue.
A Chain ID is a combination of numbers used by MetaMask, the most popular software cryptocurrency wallet, to sign transactions for a network. An incorrect Chain ID causes transactions to fail because users are not connected to the correct network.
“You were warned, multiple times, by companies and individuals, that that exact Chain ID is already in use. Now, as you can see in the comments, people are having issues due to this Chain ID mismatch,” one Twitter user said, while others criticized the ETHW team for not checking whether the Chain ID was in use.
ETHPoW Gets Battered On First Launch Day
The ETHW token extended its downtrend on the first day of its mainnet launch. According to data by CoinGecko, the coin has plunged to an all-time low of around $12, down by more than 40% over the past 24 hours. The coin had reached an ATH of $58.54 on September 3 and also soared by 80% to $52 on the day of the Merge.
Meanwhile, the broader crypto market is largely flat over the past 24 hours. The leading cryptocurrency is consolidating around the $20,000 mark, while Ethereum is trading above $1,450, still struggling to gather momentum despite all the optimism around its future as a more efficient, secure, and scalable coin.
