According to data, the Ethereum Proof of Work forks has sharply declined in the days since the merger.
Ethereum PoW Forks Have Fallen by 66% Within Five Days
Arcane Research has released the weekly report that shows the ETH PoWforks are performing very badly against ETH ever since the merge.
It was a highly publicized transition of Ethereum to a Proof of Stake consensus mechanism. This effectively obscured the involvement of miners.
Some communities, who were still in favour of the PoW-based system, decided to make forks when the merger approached.
They still rely on mining to achieve consensus, and therefore have naturally attracted stranded ETH miners.
This chart shows the popularity of some popular forks (ETHW, ETC and ETF) compared to Ethereum during the last five-days.
Source: Arcane Research's The Weekly Update - Week 37, 2022| Source: Arcane Research's The Weekly Update - Week 37, 2022
The graph above shows that Ethereum is struggling ever since its merger, with around 17% of negative returns.
PoW Forks however have shown even greater losses. ETHW reported losses up to 66% and ETF investors suffered further losses with their holdings dropping by more than 72%.
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.
These cryptos are currently under pressure because Ethereum holders have been selling off airdrops.
ETC witnessed a significant number of ETH miners connect to the network. This led to a hashrate and, consequently, a difficult 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.
ETH price
At the time of writing, Ether’s price floats around $19.1k, down 5% in the last seven days. The crypto’s value has dropped 10% over the last month.
The chart below shows how the currency’s price has changed over the course of five days.
Cryptocurrency seems to be in decline since the plunge a few days ago | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView
Featured Image from Kanchanara, Unsplash.com. Charts from TradingView.com. Arcane Research