Last night the “ETH merger” went off without a hitch, which means that the Ethereum blockchain has moved from “Proof of Work” to “Proof of Stake”, which means much greater efficiency (99.5% less power) in the future. But it also means that a large number of miners (those who bought up all the GPUs during the pandemic) have equipment that can no longer be used in the ETH chain. Many of these miners will switch to the older fork “Ethereum Classic”, which is still POW, or possibly switch to BTC mining. But a group of miners decided to keep the coins they have and “forked” the ETH chain, meaning if you had some ETH coins in your wallet on September 15, you still have them, but you also have an identical copy in the ETF (EthereumFair) and ETHW (EthereumPoW) chains.
I don’t really believe in any PoW forks (especially ETFs) and would like to see PoW cease to exist, but whatever your personal reasons may be, you may want to withdraw your money from the new fork, and now is a good time to do so, since the value of the fork is relatively high and if it is like other forks, it will likely drop over time. Here’s what it takes:
Protect your investment in the main fork
ETH forks with different chain IDs should be protected from replay attacks, but forks use the same addresses as the existing blockchain. This means that trying to trade on a fork can leak information about your private key to that fork, and that information can be used to steal your main coin (ETH). So the first step would be to transfer all your ETH to the new ETH address.
- Open Metamask or any other wallet you use and create a new account (or add it to your hardware wallet and import it).
- Transfer any assets (tokens) you have to the new address, this should be done first, as you will need ETH gas to pay for the transfer.
- Transfer any ETH you have to the new address.
Once completed, even if an intruder takes possession of your locked keys, he will only be able to rob your empty wallet.
Get your ETHW coins
Now that your ETH coins are safe, you can add the ETHW network to your Metamask. Go to Metamask and select “Add Network”:
And add the ETHW network:
After switching to this network you should see that the original balance is still on this fork address (as if you never sent it), this is because it is still there, the transaction you made was only on the fork ETH.
ETHW to ETH exchange
The next step is to exchange ETHW to ETH (or something else). So far I found only one exchange which accepts deposits. Beware of this step and do your research about exchanges, because at this step it’s easy to lose your newly found ETHW on dubious exchanges. The first step after creating or researching an exchange is to transfer your ETHW (make sure Metamask is set to ETHW, and your old, forked wallet. You do NOT want to transfer your ETH to an unknown address on the forked ETHW). To the exchange:
After completing your deposit you can sell your ETHW (I couldn’t find a way to sell it for ETH, but you can sell it for USDT on mexc).
Then you can use USDT to buy ETH (easier to withdraw).
Finally, you can withdraw the converted tokens back to your ETH wallet, again make sure that your public metamask address for the return is back in the ETH network and for your new address without the fork.
Get your ETF
They may not be worth the claim because when I was able to get them to work, the exchange rate dropped to about 1000:1 (vs 100:1 for ETHW), also the exchange I found has a .01 limit (about $20 at the time) to withdraw ETH, which means I had to risk some ETH to “bulk up” my wallet on the exchange to drain it, so check the exchange rate and the amount you have in the chain before you decide to make the effort. I have found 1 exchange so far (feel free to comment on others) and it requires you to have a non-US IP address to use, but otherwise I have been able to wire ETFs through it. First, create an account on the Houbi exchange, then set up your Metamask to add an ETF chain (different from ETHW and ETH PoS):
After that, just like with ETHW, deposit your ETF on the exchange from Metamask (make sure you have the right chain selected), wait for completion (I got the email), exchange the ETF for USDT and then USDT for ETH or whatever coin you want to withdraw, add some ETH to the exchange if your withdrawal limit is lower, and finally withdraw the amount to your account. As stated above, just because it worked for me doesn’t mean it will work for you, so please do your own research on the exchange and its rules.
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