Justin Sun, Poloniex Back Plan to Create a PoW Ethereum Hard Fork

cryptonews.com:

Ethereum (ETH) miners fearing the worst should the network’s much-vaunted move to proof-of-stake (PoS) go ahead next month could be thrown a lifeline – with Justin Sun and his Poloniex crypto trading platform stating that they will provide support for a proposed proof-of-work fork (PoW) fork.

The Ethereum network currently uses a PoW protocol that allows miners to mint new tokens, but while moving to PoS might help ETH’s cause in some respects, it would leave miners on the network in a dark place. Their rigs would become effectively worthless in the blink of an eye – unless they could be repurposed to mine on other networks.

One solution to this problem has been put forward by the Chinese miner Chandler Guo, who has said he will fork the Ethereum network to create a PoW “version” of ETH.

Indeed, Guo has been bullish on the matter in recent weeks, and has suggested that he wants to create a genuine rival to a PoS version of Ethereum.

And Sun, the Founder of Tron (TRX), has suggested that he will back the move. In a tweet, he wrote that Poloniex “currently has” more than ETH 1 million, adding:

“If [the] Ethereum hard fork succeeds, we will donate some forked ETHW to [the] ETHW community and developers to build [the] Ethereum ecosystem.”

Poloniex, meanwhile, stated that it had been the world’s first exchange to list ETH and would soon become “the first one to support [a] potential forking of ETH with [the] listing of two potential forked ETH tokens.”

In a blog post, the exchange wrote that its move to list both forked tokens would “mitigate the risks from market volatility during the hard fork and safeguard users’ assets.”

Guo, meanwhile, has prior experience in Ethereum forks: He was instrumental in backing the Ethereum split in