ETHW Surges as Binance Launches Ethereum Proof-of-Work Mining Pool

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance today announced an Ethereum Proof-of-Work (ETHW) mining service for its users. Binance further announced Thursday that those who take part in the ETHW pool will not be charged a fee until October 29. 

Mining pools are formed when groups of crypto miners want to share resources to allow other miners to work with them and collectively have a better chance of processing a transaction. Binance gives its users the chance to join pools with a service called Binance Pool. 

ETHW surged at the news: the cryptocurrency at the time of writing was trading for $12.21, a 12% increase over the prior 24 hours. Earlier today it was as high as $12.72 per token, according to CoinGecko. 

ETHW is a new asset that was born out of Ethereum’s merge earlier this month.

Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, moved over to proof of stake in a long-anticipated transition known as the merge. The long and well-publicized switch to a new consensus mechanism made the cryptocurrency far more energy efficient by eliminating the need for miners and replacing them with validators who instead stake cryptocurrency and don’t use expensive and energy-intensive machines to secure the network. 

But ahead of the merge, prominent Chinese miner Chandler Guo launched a campaign to oppose the merge because he wanted to keep miners in work. 

The result was ETHW—a completely new cryptocurrency via a hard fork which still uses proof-of-work mining. 

Major mining pools announced support for the asset and a number of big exchanges—including Coinbase—have said they would not rule out listing ETHW.

In announcing its ETHW mining pool, Binance noted, "In order to protect Binance users, ETHW will go through the same strict listing review process as Binance does for any other coin/token. Supporting ETHW on Binance Pool does not guarantee the listing of ETHW."