How to exchange forked ETHW and ETF for ETH
Last night, the “ETH Merge” went off without a hitch, meaning that the Ethereum blockchain switched from being “Proof of Work” to “Proof of Stake” this will mean much greater efficiency (99.5% less electricity) going forward. But it also means that a large number of miners (those folks buying up all the GPU’s during the pandemic) have hardware that is no longer useful on the ETH chain. Many of these miners will go to the much older “Ethereum Classic” fork which is still POW, or perhaps switch to mining BTC. But a group of miners have decided to keep the coins they have and “Forked” the ETH chain, meaning if on September 15th, you had some ETH coins in your wallet, you still have those, but you also have an identical copy in the ETF (EthereumFair) and ETHW (EthereumPoW) chains.
I don’t have much faith in either PoW fork (Especially ETF), and would like to see an end to PoW, but whatever your personal reason, you may want to get your money out of the new fork, and right now is a good time to do so since the value of the fork is relatively high, and if it’s anything like other forks will likely drop over time. Here are the steps to do so:
Protect your main fork investment
ETH Forks with different chain ID’s are supposed to be immune to replay attacks, but forks use the exact same addresses as the existing blockchain. This means that trying to trade on the fork could leak your private key information to that fork, and that information can be used to steal your main coin (ETH). So the first step is to transfer all your ETH to a new ETH address.
- Open Metamask, or whatever wallet you use and create a new account (or add one in your hardware wallet and import)
- Transfer any assets (tokens) you have into the new address, this should be done first as you’ll need ETH gas to pay for the transfer
- Transfer any ETH you have into the new address
Once completed, even if a bad actor gets a hold of your private keys, they will only be able to rob your now empty wallet.
