Data shows that Ethereum proof-of-work forks drop sharply in the days after the merge.
Ethereum PoW fork dropped 66% in just five days
According to the latest weekly report from mystery researchETH PoW forks have performed very poorly against ETH since the merge
The much-discussed event transitioned Ethereum to a proof-of-stake consensus system, essentially obfuscating the use of miners on the network.
However, some communities that favored the old PoW-based system decided to fork during the merger.
These new forks still rely on miners to reach consensus on the network and therefore naturally attract stranded ETH miners.
Here’s a chart showing how some popular forks (ETC, ETHW, and ETF) have compared to Ethereum over the past five days:
Looks like the worst performer out of these was ETF | Source: Arcane Research's The Weekly Update - Week 37, 2022
As you can see in the graph above, Ethereum has been struggling since the consolidation, registering a negative return of around 17%.
The PoW fork, however, has gotten worse. ETHW posted losses of over 66%, while ETF investors are still deep in the red as their holdings fell by more than 72% during the period.
The best of the bunch was Ethereum Classic, 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 return.
The report noted that this was not unexpected as forks would struggle with any meaningful adoption and were expected to see almost no significant DeFi activity.
According to reports, the current selling pressure in these cryptos is likely Ethereum holders selling their airdrops.
ETC has seen a large amount of ETH miners connecting to the network, causing a hashrate, and therefore a disadvantage for the coin, to explode.
Since Ethereum Classic’s miner income is less than $1 million per day, while they were over $20 million for ETH, mining crypto on the same scale as ETH is not viable in the long run.
ETH value
At the time of writing, Ether is priced at around $19.1k, down 5% over the past seven days. In the last month, the crypto price has lost 10%.
The chart below shows the currency price trend over the last five days.
The value of the crypto seems to have failed to recover from the plunge a few days back | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView
Featured image from Kanchanara on Unsplash.com, charts from TradingView.com, Arcane Research
