Vitalik Buterin
What the fork? Ethereum’s potential forked ETHW token is trading under $100
A non-difficulty bomb ETHW chain could grab 2%–10% of Ethereum's market capitalization, crypto hedge fund manager says.
An Ethereum fork token that does not yet exist, dubbed ETHW, is trading under $100 across several crypto exchanges after debuting at $30.
ETHW and ETHS begin trading
ETHW is the native asset to the ETHPoW chain. ETHPoW, for now, is a possible new chain backed by proof-of-work (PoW) miners as the original chain switches to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus in September's "Merge" event.
Meanwhile, the proof-of-stake version ETHS is trading at around $1,600, or the difference between the ETH price and the ETHW price.
We promise there won't be any premining or additional token issuance. So there is nowhere to save a reward for any contributors and supporters at this moment. However, if any beneficiaries would love to reward early supporters, we will connect beneficiaries with early supporters. https://t.co/gj4b81LD3V
— ETHPoW (@EthereumPoW) August 8, 2022
As a result of this potential chain split, anyone holding a certain number of the original chain's Ether (ETH) will automatically receive an equal amount of ETHW tokens. Such speculations have prompted some exchanges to list ETHW for trading in advance.
For instance, Poloniex announced support for both ETHW, as well as ETHS, the PoS chain token, listed for trading against Ether.
Trading is now live for the Ethereum (ETH) potential hard fork tokens! @justinsuntron
— Poloniex Exchange (@Poloniex) August 7, 2022
ETHW(ETH1)/ETH: https://t.co/QeY2Yk1a9E
ETHS(ETH2)/ETH: https://t.co/yS1piE47u4 pic.twitter.com/8Ko44ykWqd
Crypto exchange MEXC Global and Gate.io have also listed ETHW and ETHS on its platform. While OKX CEO Jay Hao has committed that they would list the newly forked Ethereum coins if there is "sufficient demand" for them among traders.
At @OKX, we actively monitor and will support the #Ethereum Merge.
— jay_star.okx ⚛️ OKX CEO (@star_okx) August 8, 2022
Potential Ethereum hard forks may emerge when the network's upgrade takes effect.
We will evaluate and list the newly forked coins if there is sufficient demand.
Crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX also launched Tether-margined contracts for ETHW, creating more room for price speculation ahead of the token's potential inception post Merge.
ETHW trading at how much?
ETHW debuted on Poloniex and MEXC Global on Aug. 8 at around $30 per token. On the same day, it rallied 333% to $130 before correcting to approximately $100 on Aug. 9. Trading volume was stable throughout the period.
Will ETHPoW survive?
Forked chains seldom survive, mainly due to a lack of support from app developers, miners and promoters. Nonetheless, some projects have witnessed reasonable adoption by users and miners alike (e.g. Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum Classic).
Notably, Hongcai "Chandler" Guo, a San Francisco-based angel investor in Bitcoin and Ethereum startups, has emerged as the main backer of ETHPoW. He claims he has a team of 60 developers working on getting rid of the so-called "difficulty bomb," a software tool designed to force the PoW-to-PoS transition.
Related: F2Pool co-founder responds to allegations it's cheating the Ethereum POW system
On the other hand, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin called fork supporters "a couple of outsiders" that own crypto exchanges and "want to make a quick buck."
He reasserted that Ethereum miners already have a PoW alternative in Ethereum Classic, the original version of Ethereum, noting that it has "a superior community and superior product for people pro-proof-of-work."
$ETC is the original chain. $ETH is a fork. And $ETHW is a fork of a fork. pic.twitter.com/0PkIYu4RrE
— ETCPOW (@ETCPOW) August 5, 2022
Ethereum Classic (ETC) has rallied nearly 150% since the Merge's announcement on July 14.
Meanwhile, a non-difficulty bomb version of ETHW could grab 2%–10% of Ethereum's market capitalization, said Kevin Zhou, the co-founder of Galois Capital, a crypto hedge fund.
He explains that Ethereum could split into at least three chains after the Merge: ETHW (without the difficulty bomb), ETHW (with the difficulty bomb) and ETHS.
How do you think the Ethereum Merge will play out? @Galois_Capital’s Kevin Zhou thinks there will be at least *three* forks and discusses why he thinks the POW chain will maintain a “decent amount of the market cap.”
— Laura Shin (@laurashin) August 5, 2022
Watch the full ep on @Unchained_pod https://t.co/FkpLEbEJkk pic.twitter.com/akwljH28qC
Zhou warned about potential liquidations in the Ethereum forked token markets but admitted that the tokens could survive at lower prices.
The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.
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Vitalik Buterin proposes stealth addresses for anonymous NFT ownership
“You would be able to eg. send an NFT to vitalik.eth without anyone except me (the new owner) being able to see who the new owner is,” said the Ethereum co-founder.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has suggested there may be a “low-tech approach” to incorporating privacy features ito nonfungible token, or NFT, transactions.
In a Monday post on the Ethereum research channel, Buterin implied Merkle trees and Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge, or ZK-SNARKs, were a more complicated method for stealth addresses for ERC-721 tokens, while proposing his own solution. The Ethereum co-founder suggested instead that smart contract wallets could include a method that would allow the sender to essentially mask their address to third parties.
“You would be able to eg. send an NFT to vitalik.eth without anyone except me (the new owner) being able to see who the new owner is,” said Buterin.
Idea: stealth addresses for ERC721s.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) August 8, 2022
A low-tech approach to add a significant amount of privacy to the NFT ecosystem.
So you would be able to eg. send an NFT to vitalik.eth without anyone except me (the new owner) being able to see who the new owner is.https://t.co/UdqK6NAYjn
Buterin posited that using this method, senders would need to include “enough ETH to pay fees 5-50 times” through the transfer chain. However, he added that “maybe there is a better generic solution that involves specialized searchers or block builders somehow.”
Related: Vitalik: Centralized USDC could decide the future of contentious ETH hard forks
Finding the balance between semi-anonymity and transparency on the blockchain has been a challenge for many as the crypto space continues to grow. In January, Cointelegraph reported there were cases of users swiping IP addresses off of NFT marketplace OpenSea as well as Metamask.
Buterin will be speaking at Korea Blockchain Week from Aug. 7-14.
Vitalik: Layer-2 scaling will make crypto payments ‘make sense’ again — KBW 2022
“It's a vision that has been, I think, forgotten a little bit and I think one of the reasons why it has been forgotten is basically because it got priced out of the market,” Vitalik Buterin said.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has argued that crypto payments will once again “make sense” as transaction costs will soon fall to fractions of a cent due to layer-2 rollups.
The Cointelegraph team currently on the ground at Korea Blockchain Week (KBW) quoted Buterin as stating that the final hurdle to getting transactions down to fractions of a cent at scale is blockchain data compression.
He pointed to “solid work happening” with roll-ups at the moment such as Optimism’s layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum, which has worked to get the size and cost of data in blockchain transactions down by introducing zero byte compression.
“So today with roll ups, transaction fees are generally somewhere between $0.25, sometimes $0.10, and in the future with roll ups with all of the improvements to efficiency that I talked about. The transaction costs could go down to $0.05, or even maybe as low as $0.02. So much cheaper, much more affordable, and a complete game changer.”
Despite primarily functioning as a speculative store of value, Buterin emphasized the key use case of Bitcoin (BTC) presented in its white paper from 2008 was to provide a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system” that was cheaper than traditional payment methods.
However, while that was true up until 2013 according to Buterin, this became no longer the case in 2018 when adoption increased and blockchain transactions became too expensive.
“It's a vision that has been, I think, forgotten a little bit and I think one of the reasons why it has been forgotten is basically because it got priced out of the market,” he said.
In the Ethereum co-founder’s view, BTC and other assets will soon be able to provide this use case once again as scaling solutions — such as the lightning network in the case of BTC — gradually bring the costs down to fractions of a cent.
Crypto payment use cases
Buterin outlined a couple of different areas that cheap crypto transaction will be particularly important. Firstly he pointed to “lower income countries or places where the existing financial system is not very effective,” as it will give citizens access to vital payments structure over the internet, something which is already adopted despite the cost for international remittances.
Related: 60 million NFTs could be minted in a single transaction: StarkWare founder
Secondly, he noted that in the context of Ethereum, cheap crypto transactions will also help ramp up adoption for non-financial applications such as domain name system (DNS) servers, humanity proof of attendance protocols and Web3 account management services.
“You need to actually send a transaction to create a DNS name, you need to actually send the transaction to recover your account, you need to actually send a transaction to meet some of these adaptations. If doing each of those operations costs like $11, then people are not going into it.”
“Scalability isn't just like some boring thing where you just need like cost numbers go down scalability, I think actually enables and unlocks entirely new classes of applications,” he added.
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