Can Ethereum PoW fork chain freeze on-chain assets?

On August 18, the official Twitter account of EthereumPoW stated that EthereumPoW will freeze more than 1.4 million ETH in the future, and therefore urged users to remove ETHW from the liquidity pool.

Is this possible? How?

Let’s first take a look at the specific content of this publication.

EthereumPoW released an initial list of contracts that will be frozen during the hard fork, advising users to withdraw ETH from all pools before the hard fork.

This is the first batch of frozen contracts of ETHW Core, with a total of 85 contracts and a locked amount of approximately 1.4 million ETH tokens.

By observing the properties of the contracts in the list, it is mainly the locked positions in the Uniswap and SushiSwap liquidity pools. For the corresponding projects, Compound's cETH token pool is the largest locked position, containing about 465,100 ETH, followed by Aave's aWETH token pool containing 312,781 ETH.

The EthereumPoW team said that after the hard fork, these tokens remaining in the liquidity pool will become easy prey for hackers.

In addition, some media stated that the ETHW Core team has removed the difficulty bomb of the forked chain and will abolish the burning mechanism of Ethereum EIP-1559 in the future.

These operations on the chain sound surprising, but in my opinion, it is obvious that the narrative of these operations will eventually point to the new token ETHW.

It can also be said that these actions fully demonstrate the PoW fork narrative.

After the Ethereum merger, node validators need to re-operate new nodes. If there is a fork, the forker needs to keep the original node client version running, or switch to a new node client. Therefore, the chains are operated on different clients separately, which becomes two chains.

Before the fork begins, the forked chain will begin to synchronize the on-chain ledger data of Ethereum PoW. Currently, all the data on the Ethereum chain is on the PoW chain, and the forked chain synchronizes the on-chain data, which means that the assets on the chain will be synchronously recorded on the forked chain.

The assets on the chain are the digital balances and other transaction data recorded in the corresponding accounts and contracts. So the ledger is equal to everything on the chain.

When it is necessary to assign value to these "copied" on-chain "numbers", corresponding exchanges, DApps, and contracts are needed to cooperate.

When Ethereum forks, the network is actively upgraded by the foundation, and wallets, defi, etc. will be migrated and deployed to ensure that the assets of the original chain can continue to be used in the new chain environment.

The exchanges will also maintain their support for on-chain assets, which means that exchanges, dapps, and wallets will also support other chains.

When the current dapp is migrated to the ETC or ETHW chain, it means that its synchronized data will also have assets in the corresponding page, and the assets can continue to be used for exchange value.

Of course, ETC is different from ETHW. ETC is already a completely different chain from Ethereum. It allows applications to directly migrate assets through contracts without synchronizing data on the Ethereum chain.

If ETHW wants to migrate most of its value, it needs to synchronize in this way to keep the assets original on the PoW chain valuable for those who want to migrate their assets in the future.

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, ETHW will freeze the assets on the current chain, which is impossible to achieve on the current Ethereum chain or the future Ethereum chain.

The value of its frozen assets also requires the help of the corresponding project’s contract, unless a new asset tool and contract are issued in the new fork chain, the corresponding value can be redeemed in the new fork chain.

That’s why Vitamin Buterin said that Ethereum will not be adversely affected by the planned PoW hard fork, and users should be wary of the motives of instigators.

As I said earlier, all operations point the narrative to ETHW, which means that the forking party will definitely protect and preserve the value of the PoW chain to achieve the narrative situation of the fork.

If dapps do not migrate, it is possible that some centralized exchanges and DeFi will support forked chain assets brought about by duplicated ledgers, which means that such a narrative has a very low probability of being established.

With the overall direction of Ethereum already determined, the purpose of the forked chain will only be to divide assets to the greatest extent possible. The assets to be divided are not just to copy worthless data, but to divide the value of Ethereum in the narrative. It is understandable that followers act for profit, and this is also the unstoppable barbarity of cryptocurrency.