First published 16 September 2022, the day after the fork. Expanded in October 2026 so a copied balance is not described as Ethereum. On 15 September 2022 Ethereum stopped proof-of-work mining. That change is the Merge. Ethereum without the jargon is the chain that continued under proof of stake. EthereumPoW is the chain that kept mining. Chandler Guo is the person most associated with proposing it. Balances were copied at the split. A copied balance is a balance on the new chain. It is not a second claim on the same coin.
The project set the chain id to 10001 for blocks after the Merge. Ethereum’s chain id stayed 1. An address can look identical. The chain does not. The project said a transaction after the split has to carry chain id 10001, so a signature for Ethereum is not a signature for this chain. That is the design they published. It is not a set of steps for moving coins across the split. What is Ethereum Classic (ETC)? is an older proof-of-work fork. ETHW is not ETC either.
A token that was a claim on a company, such as a dollar token, was not doubled into a second set of reserves because a chain split. A USDC-shaped balance on ETHW is not the USDC Circle redeems. New ETHW is still mined. There is no 21 million cap. This page will not walk through mining. The wrong network is still the wrong city. Nothing here is an instruction to replay a transaction, to mine, or to buy ETHW.
