Ethermine To Drop PoW Ethereum Post-Merge

Ethermine, the largest Ethereum mining pool in the world, will not support a Proof-of-Work (PoW) fork following the network’s upcoming transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), dubbed the Merge.

There are 228,121 active miners currently using Ethermine and generating a total hashrate of 262.8 TH/s, according to its website. Hashrate is a measure of the computing power being used to secure a blockchain.

Many Ethereum miners have been pushing to keep the current PoW consensus mechanism going, as the switch to PoS will make their expensive mining rigs redundant.

PoW Die-Hards Plan to Fork and Mine Their Own Ethereum Chains After The Merge

It Won't be Easy to Operate in a PoS World

The Defiant

After the Merge, it will no longer be possible to mine Ether by validating the network using computer video cards (GPUs) or specialized ASIC rigs. This means that Ethermine’s ETH mining pool will switch to withdrawal-only mode once the Beacon chain takes over.

The long-awaited Ethereum upgrade is predicted to occur sometime on September 15. The Merge will kick energy-intensive miners off the network in favor of PoS validators and is expected to cut the network’s electricity consumption by more than 99%.

While Ethermine will no longer allow mining of Ether under PoW, the platform will continue to support the mining of Ethereum Classic (ETC), Ravencoin (RVN), Ergo (ERGO), and Beam (BEAM).