🔴Ethereum PoW 🔻80% since launch because…

Good Morning,

Welcome to Switch Daily. 👋

It’s happening again! With the Fed interest rate hike announcement around the corner, the market took us through another bloodbath. But who are we? We’re HODLers; we check our portfolio, wipe our tears and walk in style, knowing that this too shall pass!

Let’s circle back to business:

• Market pulse

• Ethereum PoS hacked

• Today’s news

• The Merge Corner

• A meme to shoo the gloom

Market pulse 📈

The market is crawling towards the green 🌿

After some disappointing sessions following the much anticipated Ethereum merge, Monday was a bullish session for most of the top crypto by market cap. While Sunday's low of BTC and ETH was not recovered, Ripple (XRP) led the way up after gaining investor optimism in the SEC v Ripple case outcome.

Although BTC and ETH have shaken off yesterday’s bearishness, the market is not out of volatility yet. The total crypto market cap increased by $11.7 billion on Monday to $907.1 billion. However, with BTC and ETH hitting a new September low, the market capitalization is down by $54 billion in September.

🥷Attackers take Ethereum’s PoW token for a wild ride 🎢

The Ethereum merge went through as smoothly as butter sliding through yummy dosas 🥞, but things haven't been as good for ETHPoW since day one.

BTW, what is ETHPoW?

When Ethereum proposed moving from PoW to PoS, not everyone in its community was happy about it. Some folks in the Ethereum community, especially miners, believed that Ethereum should stick to PoW (considering it's their main revenue source). One such miner named Chandler Guo gathered a few supporters and set out to fork the Ethereum network to retain the PoW model - this newborn fork is called ETHPoW, and its native token is ETHW.

Okay, but what’s wrong with that?

Nothing really, except the ETHW team forgot to change the chain ID before going live. And this led to a ripple effect of issues.

FYI - Chain ID is like a unique name provided to identify each blockchain.

For starters, users could not access the network as soon as the main net went live last Thursday. Sounds like a problem we’d face while booking a movie ticket on the release day, no? But that was not all; users complained that they could not add their ETHPoW ID to their Metamask wallets. Later the team figured that they had used the same Chain ID as the Ethereum mainnet, and the market reacted badly, crashing by over 70% since launch. Oops! 🫣

Just when the buzz around this died down, and everyone returned to having a good weekend, BlockSec, a blockchain infrastructure security firm, tweeted that ETHPoW was under replay attack. Turns out a hacker stole 200 ETHW from the Ethereum PoW chain. 😨Check this out for more deets.

The ETHW markets took a severe hit of approximately 40% after news of the exploit first surfaced. Values plummeted from $8 all the way down to $5. We still don't know whether or not the attacker cashed out the 200 ETHW that was stolen, but if they did, they made big bucks!

On a separate note, when the ETHPoW fork was announced, the Ethereum Classic community warned that there were slim chances for this new fork to succeed. Looks like their ‘I told you so moment’ has arrived early.

What else is trending? 🔥

🐶Dogecoin climbs another key crypto-list

The weekend marked a new achievement for Dogecoin (DOGE). After becoming the 2nd largest PoW crypto, the popular dog-themed memecoin flipped Polkadot (DOT) to reclaim the 10th position in terms of crypto market cap. Read more. 

🇰🇷South Korea to issue new metaverse guidelines

South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) has decided to issue a set of metaverse-related guidelines to incentivize its growth. It is now considering metaverse on par with OTT platforms and autonomous driving. Read more. 

🦧ApeCoin “unlocks” rewards for launch contributors

ApeCoin—the BAYC-inspired decentralized project with an Ethereum-specific token—is all set to reward its launch contributors by initiating a token unlock. As many as 25 million tokens (APE), valued at $132 million (at the time of writing), are to be given out. Read more. 

🎮Japanese gaming giants eye long-term blockchain adoption

Sega, Bandai Namco, Square Enix, and other big names in gaming have partnered with Oasys blockchain to create blockchain-based games. Read more.

Memewhile Ethereum Classic to ETHPoW

Well, that's a wrap for today!

See you tomorrow! 👋🏽

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