Data shows that the Ethereum proof-of-work fork dropped sharply in the days following the merger.
Ethereum PoW fork drops 66% in just five days
According to the latest weekly report Arcane Researchthe ETH PoW fork has performed terribly against ETH since the merger.
The high-profile event turned Ethereum into a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, essentially confusing miners’ usage on the network.
However, some communities that supported the old PoW-based system decided to create a fork as the merge approached.
These new forks still rely on mining to achieve consensus on the network, so naturally attract stranded ETH miners.
Here is a chart showing how some of the most popular forks (ETC, ETHW, and ETFs) 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 the chart above shows, Ethereum has struggled since the merger, with negative returns of around 17%.
However, PoW forks are even worse. ETHW has noted losses of more than 66%, while ETF investors fell further into losses with their holdings down more than 72% over the period.
The best of these is Ethereum Classic, which is down “only” 25% over the past five days. This performance is much better than the other two forks, but still significantly lower than ETH’s return.
The report notes that this is not something unpredictable, as the fork is expected to struggle to gain any meaningful adoption and hardly see any significant DeFi activity.
According to the report, the current selling pressure on these cryptocurrencies may come from ethereum holders selling airdrops.
ETC sees a large number of ETH miners connecting to the network, causing the hash rate, and therefore the difficulty and explosion of the coin.
Since Ethereum Classic miners earn less than $1 million per day, while ETH earns more than $20 million, mining cryptocurrencies doesn’t scale on the same scale as ETH in the long run.
ETH price
At the time of writing, Ether is hovering around $19.1k, down 5% over the past 7 days. The cryptocurrency has lost 10% in value over the past month.
The chart below shows the trend of the coin’s price over the past 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
