What's next for PoW miners after Ethereum Merge? Dogecoin, ETC and other Proof of Work blockchain

The long awaited Ethereum Merge that happened on Thursday this week has benefited other blockchains in some ways. Ethereum has successfully shifted its to more- efficient and environment friendly consensus mechanism Proof-of-Stake from its previous Proof-of-Work mechanism. It tends to be a major outcome after years of research and development.

The Merge made Ethereum network more than 99 percent energy efficient. This does also mean that Ethereum will now use validators instead of miners. It becomes a hunt for miners to find a new place for themselves and the latest statistics show that they found one. Meme-based cryptocurrency Dogecoin has become the second largest proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency with regard to market capitalization happened post- Ethereum Merge.

PoW based cryptocurrency Bitcoin is leading the chart and far ahead with $378.4 billion. Whereas Dogecoin's market cap is only at $7.9 billion. But this puts the meme-coin ahead of other PoW cryptocurrencies ETC and Litecoin. According to coinmarket cap, Ethereum classic (ETC) market cap stands at $4.6 billion whereas Litecoin is at $3.9 billion and MOnero (XMR) is at $2.6 billion.

PoW cryptocurrency: Beneficiaries or competitors?

Ethereum’s transition to PoS may have added pressure on PoW-powered cryptocurrency networks to make transition to a more sustainable consensus mechanism. The transition of meme-coins to PoS networks has been long discussed and deliberated. It even caught the attention of the Ethereum community at one point.

In 2021, when the discussion was at its peak, a lot of money and time flowed away from the crypto market. The proposal is still listed in the Dogecoin Trailmap that provides the roadmap for the cryptocurrency. It is interesting to note that the Dogecoin is expected to be in competition against ETHPoW, which is the Ethereum PoW hard fork chain that is expected to continue mining, as per ETHPoW’s official Twitter handle.

In 2022, Dogecoin has been in news mostly of reports of a lawsuit against Elon Musk. TESLA had announced that its buyers are expected to pay only in Dogecoins (DOGE). He was accused of pumping DOGE. He even revealed plans to launch a crypto-themed satellite named "Doge-1" to the moon.

Meanwhile Ethereum Classic, which is a hard fork of the Ethereum network stands at $4.6 billion cap value. It saw its hash rate soar to a record high on Thursday morning shortly after The Merge was completed.

ETC blockchain still works on Proof-of-Work mechanism. In 2016, Ethereum Foundation underwent a hard fork to reverse a significant hack that involved $150 million of investor funds. But the classic blockchain is far less popular than its parent Ethereum blockchain. It only took minutes for Proof of Work miners to jump to Ethereum Classic after The Merge activated on Thursday morning.

Ethereum Merge means that now Ethereum will use validators instead of miners. This is believed to provide some benefits to ETC which still allow miners on its network. Accordingly, the network will continue to use PoW mechanisms. At the time when Ethereum shifted to PoS mechanism Ethereum Classic seemed a viable option available to the miners at the moment. According to 2miners, its network hash jumped nearly 300% from 66.54 terra hashes per second (TH/s) to 275.43 TH/s on Friday.

ETC is one of the beneficiaries of the Merge among Proof of Work chains considering that only a limited number of chains are able to onboard miners running EtHash ASIC hardware.

Ravencoin and Ergo (ERG) for example are other chains available for miners after the Merge. Ravencoin’s hashrate doubled in the\ past 24 hours. On the other hand, Ergo too benefited from The Merge and its current hash rate is at 161.46 TH/s.