Introduction:

ETH has successfully completed the upgrade from POW to POS, which has been the vision of the ETH team since its inception, and has done so in a smooth manner. The two forked tokens ETC and ETHPOW have not caused much disruption either, with a combined market cap of no more than 4% of ETH. The US SEC has issued its usual “securities” warning against POS, so perhaps it’s the politics beyond the technology that will become the bigger problem in the crypto world. Let’s take a look at the events that took place in the 24 hours after the upgrade from Ether to POS.

1. At 14:43（UTC+8） on September 15, the NFT project @VanityBlocks minted “The Last POW Block” NFT in the final block of the ETH PoW era, while quoting the American ethnobotanist and mystic Terence McKenna in the transaction. “You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick.”

2. The merged ETH network produced the first PoS block (height 15537394) and the first PoS block was packaged and verified as: 0xeee27662c2b8eba3cd936a23f039f3189633e4c8. Gas fees briefly shot up to 108gwei.

3. 15 minutes before the merger, Vitalik said that the ETH merge would reduce global electricity usage by 0.2%. After the success, Vitalik said that this is an important moment for the ethereum ecosystem. Everyone who helped make the merge happen should feel very proud today.

4. At 15:00, ETC hash rate soared to 92.48 TH/s, up 55.17% in 24 hours; RVN hash rate soared to 10.092 TH/s, up 35.463% in 24 hours; CFX hash rate soared to 1.6158 TH/s, up 55.74% in 24 hours.

5. At 15:30, the Binance ETHUSDT perpetual funding rate had risen from nearly -0.5% before the merger to about -0.24%, and hedging were gradually being closed. At the same time, the ETH lent on Aave is being returned one after another after the completion of the merger, and the fund utilization rate has dropped to below 75%.

6. At 16:00, Binance and FTX have resumed token deposit and withdrawal services on the ethereum network, and DeFi and NFT protocols are working normally.

7. At 21:00, Poloniex, a subsidiary of Justin Sun, said it has decided to choose EthereumFair (ETF), a fork chain backed by a majority of the community and more PoW algorithms, as the main chain for ETHW tokens. The ETF is not the ETHPOW, which was previously pushed by Chandler Guo, but was launched by the ClassZZ technology community. BitCoke announced that all its miners have switched to fork chain ETF mining and will go live with ETF spot pairs after the system maintenance at 17:00 GMT on September 16.

8. At 21:40, Ethan Vera, chief operating officer of Luxor, an ethereum mining pool, said that competition among miners is depressing potential returns as hashing rate continues to rise on networks like ETC and RVN. About 20–30% of ETH miners have migrated to other networks, and the rest are currently shut down.

9. FTX, Bybit and other exchanges went live with EthereumPoW (ETHW). 22:06 ETHW tweeted that the ETHW mainnet was online and released the RPC URL, Chain ID and other information. ETHW uses the Ethash mining algorithm and supports GPU and Ethash ASIC miners.

10. At 23:05, ETH fell below $1,500 and ETHW dropped to $16.94.

11. At 8:00 on the 16th, ETC’s hash rate was 270 TH/s, down from the highest value of 300 TH/s, with a price of $35.93; ETHW’s hash rate was 59.87 TH/s, with a price of $13.2; ETF’s hash rate was 35 TH/s, with a price of $17.33. The hash rate is about 1/3 of ETH, and the total market cap is about 4% of ETH.

12. SEC Chairman Gary Gensler said the (POS) system used by ETH after the software update could trigger securities laws, allowing holders to “stake” their tokens in cryptocurrencies and intermediaries may have to pass the Howey test in court to determine whether assets are securities. If an intermediary like a cryptocurrency exchange offers staking services to its customers, then it “looks very similar to lending, just with a change in labeling”.

13. At 09:00 on the 16th, the ranking of the stake nodes after Ethermine to POS is as follows: 30% for Lido 14% for Coinbase 8.3% for Kraken 6.5% for Binance; at POW, 28.9% for Ethermine pool; 14.5% for F2pool; 10% for Hiveon Pool. While the degree of centralization is similar, the concentration of U.S. exchanges has increased.

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