The Ethereum community saw the launch of two new proof-of-work (PoW) Ethereum forks, ethereumpow and ethereumfair, after Ethereum made the transition from PoW to proof-of-stake (PoS) on September 15, 2022. However, the value of both coins has dropped significantly in the past four months, with ethereumpow losing 94.8% and ethereumfair losing 98.4% in value in U.S. dollars.
Ethereumpow (ETHW) is currently trading at $3.08 per unit, down from its all-time high of $58.54 on September 3, 2022. The network’s hashrate has also decreased from 68.17 terahashes per second (TH/s) to 16.99 TH/s, a loss of 75.07% since “The Merge.” The two top mining pools for ETHW are F2pool and 2miners.
Ethereumfair (ETHF) has seen a 98.4% decline in value since its all-time high of $20.59 on September 16, 2022. It has had $657,438 in global trade volume over the past 24 hours, with Gate.io as the top exchange in terms of ETHF trading volume. On January 3, 2023, it was ranked 2,736th among the 22,174 tokens listed on coinmarketcap.com.
Google Trends data shows a significant decrease in interest in these Ethereum forks since “The Merge.” The search term “Ethereum Fork” had a score of 100 the week of September 11-17, 2022, but has now dropped to a four. The same trend is seen for the search term “ETHW,” which also hit a 100 during that week, but is now barely holding on to a score of four. Conversations about these forks are also low on Twitter and forums like Reddit.
The declining price and lack of interest suggest that these two new PoW ETH forks are slowly losing relevance. Ethereum itself has also seen a 25.62% drop in value, falling from $1,635 per coin to $1,216 since the transition to PoS.