EthereumPoW plans to freeze selected contracts, community pushes back

Ethereum (ETH) is set to switch to a proof-of-stake (PoS)

 network on September 15–16, thus ending its existing proof-of-work (PoW) chain. This event would effectively end PoW mining in the Ethereum ecosystem.

In light of such a significant update, PoW supporters, particularly miners, have decided to keep the PoW chain alive. 

The core PoW team, EthereumPoW (ETHW), proposed on Tuesday that ETH investors withdraw their assets from liquidity providers (LPs) such as Uniswap, Sushiswap, Aave, Compound, and other decentralized exchanges (DEX).

To protect user assets, the core team said that ETHW tokens would be temporarily frozen in some LPs of DEX and lending protocols following the hardfork.

The core team believes that directly following the Ethereum PoW hard fork, especially in the first few blocks, users' ETHW tokens deposited in the LPs will be swapped or lent out by hackers and scientists using deprecated and worthless USDT, USDC, and WBTC, causing a huge mess for the community.

The core team stated that ETHW Core will make the hard choice to temporarily freeze some LP contracts in order to protect users' ETHW tokens until the protocols' controllers or communities discover a suitable strategy.

The team also said that freezing will not be applied to staking contracts that simply involve a single asset, such as the ETH2.0 deposit contract and Wrapped Ether.

Many members of the community were opposed to the concept of freezing users' assets without their consent. Users reminded the core team that hardcoding LP smart contracts into ETH clients is not decentralized.

Others called it a fraud and advised reporting the Twitter account claiming to be the core ETHW team.

Chandler Guo, a prominent Chinese miner who claims to be behind a 51% attack on Ethereum Classic, has also backed the PoW Ethereum hardfork.

The majority of crypto exchanges and stablecoin issuers have backed the future PoS-based Ethereum network. However, crypto exchanges have suggested that if a forked PoW chain gains traction, they would be willing to list the forked token as well, depending on community demand.

According to Messari, a crypto analytic firm, the ETH mining industry is worth $19 billion. With billions of dollars worth of infrastructure on the line, miners should support a hard fork given that mining alternative POW tokens like Ethereum Classic (ETC) or Bitcoin (BTC) won't be as profitable.

Kent Barton, tokenomics lead at ShapeShift DAO, told sources that “experts believe a forked PoW Ethereum chain will be less profitable as well, because the bulk of the community will migrate to the new network.”

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has also criticized the PoW fork, calling it an act of selfishness by a few outsiders. He advised miners to switch to ethereum as well.

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