Ethereum Merge: ALL you need to know (including ETHPOW/ ETHW)

It is finally happening. The biggest upgrade to Ethereum is coming known as the Ethereum Merge. This is when Ethereum, that's current Ethereum that's happening right now, merges with its upgrade itself that was previously called Ethereum 2, EVE2. They're now going to become one full unit. All the worlds are going to unite and there's going to be a huge upgrade also to how it functions in the backend. Now, Ethereum Merge is happening in less than seven days. This is going to happen finally. No more delays. It's going to be epic. There's a lot to know about what is happening with the Merge. There's a lot of misconceptions that I want to trade correct in this video. And finally, there's some advanced strategies as well. This is surrounding the coin ETH or the airdrop of the coin ETH POW. This is making a lot of waves in the Chinese markets and it's already taken up some form of trading. So we're going to take a look at how to take advantage of this because there might be some free money that you don't want to waste or miss out on. So let's talk about how to take advantage of that as well. So anyways, guys, I know I haven't been making videos in a while. I'm still going to make videos in the future, but I only want to really cover the most important stuff. And this is really important. I really want to keep you guys up to date. And if you guys want to keep up to date to the most important stuff without all the drama, subscribe to the BoxMining channel. That's what we're all about. Let's get started. So let's just start off with what is the Ethereum merge? What is all the fuss about? Why is it such a big upgrade? Well, this is really the event where the old Ethereum that was relying on proof of work on miners. I mean, we talked about the mining on BoxMining channel, but people who use graphics cards to mine Ethereum, that was the way it used to always work. It's now finally going to merge and upgrade to ETH2 and it's going to rely completely on proof of stake. This is a huge background change. It actually pretty much changes all the mechanisms of how Ethereum kind of validates itself and how eventual future Ethereum will be distributed to the people who upkeep the network. Namely, miners, they're being pushed out the door and the stakers, the people who just use a simple computer, don't use too much power. It's going to be a lot more energy efficient in the future. And it's also going to provide pave way to the upgrades. So if you just look at the simple chart right here, this is the merge, the panda that's been shown on the screen. That is all the merge that's happening now. So you suddenly see that shift from proof of work to proof of stake. And also it pains way for future upgrades. So you see there's a little tree down here called sharding. That is when Ethereum will go to the next level when it's going to be faster and it's going to have a lot more promising new features. So that's going to be, so it's really paving way to the future as well. So really for most intents and purposes, if you're just average user of Ethereum, yeah, you won't notice too much happening. And in fact, if you're just an average user of Ethereum, if you're just using for NFTs or some transactions, you don't really have to do too much. In fact, you have to do nothing. Everything's going to remain the same. The way you interact with Ethereum is the same. The way you store Ethereum is going to stay the same. The way you transfer Ethereum is going to stay the same. And all the apps that's already running Ethereum, they're going to be kept the same too. I mean, that's a good transition, right? But what you do have to watch out for right now are scammers who are trying to pretend that this is a big upgrade or are going to lose Ethereum if you don't do X, Y, and Z, or maybe just transfer wallets into scammers wallets or something like that. Yeah, just ignore those. That's going to pop over, especially in the coming few days, people are just going to try to scam and, you know, take advantage of the confusion after this. The next big thing you should be aware of is the existence of a potential fork, right? This will be most likely popping into the scene three to four days ahead of this merge. And there's going to be a lot of noise talking about ETH POW, ETH proof of work, or rather a non-upgrade version of Ethereum. This is very interesting because it's already being traded right now. And especially, especially in China, where it's getting a lot of momentum. In fact, the big KOLs in China, namely Chandler Guo, he has already been kind of being a proponent of ETH POW. And people are actually trading this on a few exchanges. So if you actually look on CoinMarketCap, you can search for ETH POW. And it's a brackets, it's an IOU. This doesn't exist as a coin. It doesn't exist as a chain yet. But people are already trading their futures because the exchanges want in on this. They want to exchange fees, obviously, right? And people want to know roughly what the price of this token could be. Now let's take a dive into ETH proof of work because this was probably one of the most confusing aspects of what's going to happen. And also one of the most potentially profitable aspects of what's going to happen here. So in short, when Ethereum is doing the merge, there could be a chance that a certain community decides that they don't want to do this upgrade. They want to keep Ethereum the way it currently is, especially with the proof of work mining. So miners will be a big proponent of this and they can make more money. So they want to fork the coin. So what happens when the fork happens is it's almost like a copy paste of a document. If you imagine Ethereum being a big document, it's a big copy paste happens. And what happens is that if you hold Ethereum on the Ethereum chain, you'll also hold Ethereum POW on the ETH POW chain. Essentially it kind of clones itself. Now, what is important about this is obviously the free ETH POW that you're going to receive. So first and foremost, if you hold Ethereum on the Ethereum chain, you don't have to do anything. You just have to hold it. And on a day of the fork, if ETH POW fork is successful, you're going to get it and you can log into it. Make me fine. Now, the difficulty comes if your Ethereum is stored on an exchange because not all exchange will support this. So it might be the case that if you store Ethereum on an exchange and they don't support it, they will not give you that free ETH POW. So if you want to move your Ethereum out of the exchange beforehand, you should probably consider that right now. On top of that, there's also a little bit of complications if you are a farmer and you're farming with your ETH. So if in our case, if you're using that on a lending platform, you will not get the free airdrop because the ETH technically doesn't belong to you anymore. You lent it out to someone else, right? So if you're doing any advanced decentralized finance functions, you really need to check with the protocol as to how they're dealing in the ETH POW. So how they're dealing if a fork occurs and how to deal with that free ETH POW that you will receive. For me personally, I'm moving my Ethereum out of farms. So I have been in farms in the past and I'm enjoying the 3% APY that you can get from it. But at the same time, of course, yeah, I want my free ETH POW, whether it's to keep or to sell. I'm still deciding at this current point, but I still want that free ETH POW. So I'm moving my money out. All right. Next up on Ethereum pricing pre and post merge and what are the biggest factors that will affect impact Ethereum's price? There's actually a lot of volatility right now, especially with Ethereum kind of moving up to one to $200 every day, almost for the past few days. And I expect this to continue prior to the launch of or prior to the merge. There's a lot of attention being brought to Ethereum. And also because of ETH POW and the potential to get new coins from this new fork, a lot of people may want to take advantage of this and either buy some ETH just to get the free coins, or they might just be trying to borrow lending or just play with the market to increase its volatility right now. So I expect the volatility to actually increase prior to Ethereum, the merge rather, but I do expect everything to be priced in at this current moment. So everyone knows that this merge is happening. It's already been priced in. So when you play around with it, just remember that there could be a fall in Ethereum prices after the merge, especially if the merge creates a new fork and the free coins come out. People kind of tend to sell after that because they can't get any more free coins after that. So if they were just holding it for the extra free points and for the airdrops, then they'll probably sell it afterwards. Right. So expect a little bit of volatility. There's also this potential of a little bit of fear, uncertainty, doubt coming in from ETH 2 holders. The reason for this is because people who are staking in ETH 2. So for example, me, for example, I've actually shown publicly the creation of a ETH 2 node and it required me to stake 32 ETH. This means that 32 of my Ethereum was locked up permanently in this contract and it was actually unmovable until this merge happens. So the moment this merge happens, I can start potentially unlocking some of the funds. Now I'm using my words very carefully here. Right. The reason here for that is because it's not all at once. So the people who stake 32 ETH and the people who've done many times this many times over, they don't get to unstake immediately. There's actually a kind of a system to prevent people from masks removing their ETH and masks unlocking their funds to be traded. So the biggest fear, I guess, coming here would be this unlock of ETH 2 funds. And well, at the end of the day, I actually don't think this will be the biggest impact ever because of just the slowdown of events that can happen. And also the people who do lock their funds up, they're kind of convicted holders. Like for me, I didn't expect my ETH 2 to be unlocked so quickly, honestly. So I actually don't expect the impact to be that great, although it does exist and it could potentially cause fear on the market. So there could be a case that after all this hype is over, there will be a mini dump on Ethereum. I think a lot of people are actually expecting this, to be honest, that could happen. And it may be a 10 to 20% drop due to these macro interactions that can happen. So now let's talk a little bit about advanced strategies too. Since people know that there could be a potential ETH proof of work fork and they can get free coins. So a lot of people will want to hold more Ethereum prior to this fork. And one of those strategies to do so would be to borrow Ethereum and hold it in your actual wallet. In that case, your borrowing Ethereum will also clone itself. And then of course you can return it in the future, right? If you don't want it. So that could be a strategy leading up to this. So platforms like say for compound, you can pull Ethereum out for 3%. Then if you get a new coin that's worth 3%. So it's completely possible to drop hundreds of thousands of dollars on something like compound and then pull out Ethereum. Leave that in your wallet and get the free air drops. So that is a strategy that a few people are discussing. In fact, the rates are actually quite favorable to this because the ETH withdrawal rates right now, the borrow rates rather, are around 3.2%. So if you just hold it for a week and you leave it in your wallet and the fork happens, magic, right? Other platforms like say for Aave are actually anticipating this and they've actually said that they are not going to, they're actually going to freeze Ethereum lending during this period of time. So it's kind of like a counter strategy, but it does seem to be a strategy that people are playing. I don't really recommend anything like this. It's not financial advice, but I can spot that it's happening and people are definitely taking advantage of some systems like this. So we're going to be interesting to see how it goes. And very likely those people will be the proponents for ETH POW. They're like really pipe it up and then they'll get the free coins and then magic happens, right? So yeah, that's a strategy that's going on right now. And I'm going to observe in the next few days and see how it happens. But I'm anticipating that the borrow rates for Ethereum will go up in the next few days as this is about to happen. And that's all for this Ethereum merge. So I hope you guys are excited about what's going to happen. I'm actually pretty excited because this is a big upgrade and it's finally coming. I mean, we don't have to wait till Vitalik is an old man for this to happen. So anyways, I'm pretty excited that this is happening and I'm pretty excited to what comes next too. So once that sharding comes out, that's when Ethereum gets super fast. It's going to be super freaking awesome. So anyways guys, thank you for watching this video. If you have any questions about the merge, leave them in the comments down below. If you have any other strategies as well, tell me there too. And with that guys, thank you so much for watching this video. See you in the next one.