17th September 2022 > > Two ETH hard forks!

tl;dr

There are two Ethereum hard forks! And how to claim them.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

ETH continues its post-Merge selloff further cementing the CCC’s belief that The Merge was a sell the rumour, buy the fact event.

This is in stark contrast to every other commentator out there who erroneously claimed the exact opposite.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Ethereum hard fork 1

It transpires that The Merge has spawned not just one hard fork, but two.

We all expected that ETHW – representing the original ETH blockchain still using Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism – was likely to go ahead.

Surprisingly, a third chain called ETF (Ethereum Fair) is up and running, though details are somewhat sketchy at this stage. To be honest this hard fork has all the hallmarks of being a scam in some form or other, but the perfectionist in me refuses to let it go without having a further look.

After some digging, I found an article on Medium directed at potential miners of ETF which is partly in Chinese. As we all know, there are no property rights that are practically enforceable in China - unless one happens to be part of the political elite - fuelling my fears of ETF being a scam.

Let’s take ETHW to begin with.

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The first point to note is that ETHW is trading around $10 compared to ETH at $1,400.

This means that if you own $1,000 of ETH, your “free money” accrued due to the hard fork is now just $7.

I suspect that for most people, your time is probably best spent doing something other than reading the rest of this CCC, but if your bag is of a decent size, you probably do want to lay claim to your new hard forked coins.

The means of doing so is entirely dependent upon your pre-Merge storage decision. I cannot cover all the bases, but we will look at the most popular options. If your situation is different to one of the scenarios described below, please let us know and our dedicated team of CCC researchers will find you a solution.

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If you own ETH on a centralised exchange – I assume Binance or Coinbase, as it would be foolish to hold any cryptos on any other centralised exchange – then for now you need to wait. You may or may not be credited with an equivalent notional amount of ETHW at some point in the future. If that does happen, rest assured the CCC will inform you of that fact and will provide full information as to how to monetise your new ETHW if you so wish.

If you own stETH (staked ETH to support The Merge and ETH going forward) you will not be able to claim ETHW, for obvious reasons.

If you own ETH on a decentralised exchange, in the form of a liquidity pool, it is very unlikely that you will be able to claim ETHW. If that changes, we will let you know, but I think that is a remote possibility.

If you own any other form of tokenised ETH, probably because of providing liquidity to a decentralised exchange, or it has been wrapped (WETH) for cross chain purposes, then again it seems improbable to me that you will be able to claim ETHW.

If you own ETH in a roll-up account (Arbitrum or Optimism amongst others), again, it is hard to see a mechanism for claiming ETHW, though I might very well be wrong on this point in particular.

In summary, ETH held in a self-custody wallet – Ledger Nano, Trezor, MetaMask etc. – is the option most amenable to claiming ETHW. This is what we will focus on today.

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Starting with MetaMask, most of you will be familiar with the process of adding new networks and new coins to MetaMask, but for the sake of completeness, it is worthwhile going through each step. It will not take up too much of our time.

Login to your MetaMask wallet, probably pointed at Ethereum Mainnet:

Click on the drop-down next to “Ethereum Mainnet”:

And click “Add Network” which will take you to this screen:

Fill in the following details and click “Save”:

Network Name: ETHW-mainnet

New RPC URL: https;//mainnet.ethereumpow.org

Chain ID: 10001

Currency Symbol: ETHW

Block Explorer URL: https://mainnet.ethwscan.com

Hey presto, you have the ETHW network displayed in your MetaMask, and the exact same amount of ETHW as you have of ETH:

That’s it. You are now the proud owner of ETHW.

But please do NOT do anything with ETHW just yet.

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If we look at stand-alone hardware wallets – preferably Ledger Nano though I do know some who are partial to a Trezor or two – initial news might appear to be disappointing.

Ledger Nano has specifically stated that it will not be providing support for ETHW. I suspect Trezor takes the same stance. The reasons for this are ones of security, the most important of which is the possibility of a replay attack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replay_attack).

The key concern here is that without replay protection, there is a risk that when you transfer your newly acquired ETHW your private keys could be exposed, which would undoubtedly lead to an immediate and total depletion of all your crypto assets in that wallet.

This is a remote risk, but one that should not be ignored.

I do expect that if the ETHW hard fork is shown to be viable, and secure, both Ledger and Trezor will roll out support for it. I cannot give a timing for the realisation of that expectation.

However, as always, there is a solution.

Our free training resource (https://www.curiouscryptos.com/cccourses) includes “Module 1.12: MetaMask and Ledger Nano” which details how to use MetaMask with your hardware wallet.

Follow these instructions and then refer to the process of adding the new Ethereum PoW network to MetaMask as detailed above.

That’s it. You are now the proud owner of ETHW.

But please do NOT do anything with ETHW just yet.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Ethereum hard fork 2

I just cannot leave it alone.

ETF (Ethereum Fair) is probably a scam – the name is a clue - and is undoubtedly a rabbit hole that I keep telling myself I must ignore.

I rarely listen to other people’s advice, so why listen to my own?

Let’s crack on.

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The first point of interest is that ETF is worth just 10% of ETHW, which makes the following exercise almost entirely redundant for almost everyone.

If you are interested, follow the same steps as above but when you get to the network settings, use these parameters instead:

Network Name: EthereumFair

New RPC URL: https;//rpc.etherfair.org

Chain ID: 513100

Currency Symbol: ETF

Block Explorer URL: https://explorer.etherfair.org

That’s it. You are now the proud owner of ETF.

But please do NOT do anything with ETF just yet.