Declining Interest Leads to Poor Market Performance for Ethereum Proof-of-Work Forks

After transitioning from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS), the Ethereum community saw the launch of two new PoW Ethereum forks: ethereumpow and ethereumfair. In the past four months, the value of both coins has dropped by 94.8% to 98.4% in U.S. dollars.

PoW Ethereum Forks Ethereumpow and Ethereumfair Suffer Significant Value Loss After Launch

Since their launch in September 2022, the two newly introduced Ethereum forks that use a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm have seen significant value loss. Ethereum itself made the transition from PoW to proof-of-stake (PoS) on Sept. 15, 2022, known as “The Merge.” Since then, ETH has dropped 25.62% in value, falling from $1,635 per coin to $1,216.

The two forks that followed Ethereum’s transition to PoS have performed poorly, losing 94.8% to 98.4% in value since then. Ethereumpow (ETHW) is currently trading at $3.08 per unit, down from its all-time high of $58.54 on September 3, 2022. ETHW’s price was calculated before the chain was live, as some exchanges offered IOU markets before the fork.

ETHW/USD chart on Jan. 3, 2023.

In addition to its 94.8% loss in value in U.S. dollars, ETHW has also fallen 19.8% in the past month. However, over the past two weeks, ETHW has seen some improvement, climbing 4.3% in value. As of Jan. 3, 2023, ETHW is ranked 94th among the top 100 tokens in terms of market capitalization, with an overall market valuation of around $326.40 million.

In addition to its price decline over the past four months, the network’s hashrate has fallen from 68.17 terahash per second (TH/s) to 16.99 TH/s, a loss of 75.07% since The Merge took place. The top two mining pools for ETHW currently are F2pool and 2miners. Ethereumfair (ETHF) is a lesser-known Ethereum fork, and it is not assigned a rank on coingecko.com.

On Jan. 3, 2023, it was ranked 2,736th among the 22,174 tokens listed on coinmarketcap.com. ETHF has declined 98.4% since its all-time high of $20.59 on September 16, 2022. It has seen $657,438 in global trade volume over the past 24 hours, with Gate.io as the top exchange in terms of ETHF trading volume.

Over the past four months, there has been little mention of these Ethereum forks, and Google Trends data shows a significant decrease in interest since “The Merge.” The search term “Ethereum Fork” had a score of 100 the week of Sept. 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 proof-of-work ETH forks are slowly losing relevance.

Source