The Ethereum network is all set to leave its current proof-of-work (PoW) consensus and transition to the proof-of-stake (PoS) chain by September 15-16. This means Ethereum’s PoW now has a fixed number of hashes left to mine.
As such, miners have decided to keep the PoW chain alive and recommended ETH holders withdraw their assets from liquidity providers such as Uniswap Sushiswap, Aave, Compound, and other decentralized exchanges (DEX). The team will temporarily freeze ETHW tokens in liquidity providers of DEX and lending protocols after the hard fork. It believes that users’ ETHW tokens deposited in the liquidity providers, after the Ethereum PoW hard fork, will be swapped or lent out by hackers and scientists using deprecated and valueless USDT, USDC, and WBTC. This in turn would create a huge mess for the community.
The Ethereum core team said it has to make the hard decision until the protocol’s controllers or communities find a better way. It clarified that freezing will not be applied to the staking contracts that only involve a single asset such as ETH2.0 deposit contract and Wrapped Ether. However, the community is hesitant and doesn’t like the idea of freezing users’ accounts without their consent. The users told the core team that suspending hardcoded liquidity providers’ smart contracts into the ETH clients is not decentralized at all. A user explained that if this is done then the value proposition of ETHW being a decentralized secure blockchain is gone. He suggested other measures have to be taken. Others called it a scam and suggested reporting the Twitter account claiming to be the core ETHW team.
