Share this article
Ethereum Miner Chandler Guo Predicts 90% of PoW Miners Will Go Bankrupt
The Merge put a big hurt on mining, the proof-of-work advocate told CoinDesk TV. He believes the Ethereum fork he backs will draw what miners remain as the glitches are fixed.
Updated Apr 9, 2024, 11:32 p.m. Published Sep 16, 2022, 4:25 p.m.
Life has gotten harder for ether miners since the Ethereum blockchain's Merge upgrade.
With the change to a proof-of-stake system, miners and their energy-burning computers are no longer needed to validate transactions.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Read more: Ethereum After the Merge: What Comes Next?
Some of those miners have turned to a proof-of-work (PoW) fork of Ethereum so they can continue mining. But even Chandler Guo, one of the fork's strongest advocates, thinks only 10% of miners using PoW to mine ETHPOW (the token of the Ethereum Merge fork) or ETC (the token of Ethereum Classic) will ultimately survive.
Ethereum miner Guo told CoinDesk TV’s “First Mover” program on Friday the miners with access to cheaper electricity will be the ones that survive.
“Some people [miners] have free electricity and can [continue] to work on that,” Guo said, referring to the PoW fork. “The other 90%, bankrupt.”
Read more: Ethereum PoW Network Sees Complaints on Day 1 Amid Data Goof-Up
Early Thursday, Ethereum, the second-biggest blockchain after Bitcoin, smoothly made the historic move of migrating from its proof-of-work consensus mechanism to a faster and less-energy-consuming protocol known as proof-of-stake (PoS).
As for the PoW fork, things didn't go as smoothly. There were complaints about problems accessing the blockchain's servers while attempts to set up a crypto wallet failed.
"Some people can connect, some people cannot connect," Guo responded. "It depends on your speed of the network."
Guo has been a strong advocate for keeping Ethereum as a PoW system, and told CoinDesk in August that he would issue a fork to support that protocol.
Now, however, Guo rates the PoW fork debut a "mediocre" 5 on a scale of 10. He expects that will change with time as more miners get involved.
Read more: Miner Chandler Guo Repeats Support for Ethereum Fork Post-Merge
More For You
What to know:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
More For You
Solana’s Drift Launches v3, With 10x Faster Trades
With v3, the team says that about 85% of market orders will fill in under half a second, and liquidity will deepen enough to bring slippage on larger trades down to around 0.02%.
What to know:
- Drift, one of the largest perpetuals trading platforms on Solana, has launched Drift v3, a major upgrade meant to make on-chain trading feel as fast and smooth as using a centralized exchange.
- The new version will deliver 10-times faster trade execution thanks to a rebuilt backend, marking the largest performance jump the project has made so far.
Top Stories
