ETHW hasn’t launched yet – but you can already trade it

ETHW is currently trading at around $20.55.

Exchanges Open ETHW trading

Hours after the Ethereum network completed its “Merge” into Proof-of-Stake, exchanges have begun opening spot markets for a potential ETHW fork token.

FTX appears to have been the first to launch a spot market for ETHW around 09:00 UTC. Several users holding ETH on the exchange reported receiving an equivalent amount of ETHW in their accounts.

Although FTX users can now buy and sell ETHW on the exchange, users do not trade the token itself. Instead, FTX has issued “IOU” tokens that can be exchanged for the token when the fork eventually launches.

“ETHW represents the potential canonical ETH Proof-of-Work (PoW) token. If FTX determines that no such token has appeared, the token will settle to zero,” FTX said in a disclosure attached to the token’s trading page on its website. “ETHW is highly volatile and can lose much of its value. Please take the time to research the risks associated with trading this product.”

Other crypto exchanges seem to be following FTX’s move. Derivatives also exchange ByBit announced that it had opened an ETHW/USDT spot market and will launch withdrawals and deposits once the Ethereum Proof-of-Work main chain goes live. MEXC Global, another exchange that had previously promised to send ETHW tokens to ETH holders, has also launched trading pairs for the asset.

According to data from CoinGecko, the ETHW spot market price is currently around $20.55. At current prices, the asset’s market value is valued at 1.38% of the value of ETH.

Ethereum’s PoW Fork

In the weeks leading up to the merger, a group of anonymous developers planned to split the Ethereum blockchain after the merger. The fork, called EthereumPoW, wants to keep a version of the network running with a Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism. ETHW is set to be distributed to ETH holders when the network launches.

The official EthereumPoW Twitter account revealed details for the hardfork earlier this afternoon and made several pull requests on the project’s GitHub repository. Although EthereumPoW developers have released a network RPC URL and chain ID, early reports suggest that the network is currently not operational. Centralized exchanges will likely be the first to have active deposits for the new token when the network becomes fully operational sometime in the next 12 to 24 hours.

Disclosure: At the time of writing this piece, the author owned ETH and several other cryptocurrencies.