ETHPoW team confirms it will use ChainID 10001 to avoid replay attacks on Mainnet

A member of the Coinbase team had to comment on the ETHPoW GitHub repository to clarify for the team how the forked chain would be set up. Currently, the repository does not update the network’s ChainID to be different from the Ethereum mainnet.

We’ve reached the point in the ETHPoW saga where the Coinbase protocol team themselves have submitted a PR to the repo to fix the chain ID issue.

And still no response from the team. pic.twitter.com/AhQ3FFWEm4

— Frankie (@FrankieIsLost) September 9, 2022

ETHPoW testnet uses ChainID 10002, not used by any other chain.Ethereum mainnet ChainID is 1 and many other numbers are Available to the PoW chain.

Coinbase wasn’t the only team trying to solve this problem. 4 other pull requests We are requesting the developer to update the ChainID.

ETHPoW team responded In response to a Coinbase pull request on Sept. 9, he said:

“ethw’s chainid is 10001 and we publish it on our twitter account. ChainID 1 is required to verify the chain data of the block before merging, and all chain data after merging will be chainID 10001, so the above You should keep the code you mentioned in your comment.”

This news should calm many nerves within the Ethereum ecosystem, knowing that not updating the ChainID does not appear to be malicious.

Ethereum PoW and its Importance

A post-merge proof-of-work hard fork of Ethereum has been theorized several times over the past few weeks. Poloniex founder Justin Sun has announced that the exchange will support his Ethereum hard fork by donating up to $1 million of his ETHPoW to build a developer community on the new chain. did.

However, there are many misconceptions about The Merge and the move to Proof of Stake. The main Ethereum chain, known as Mainnet, will continue to run throughout The Merge, and a new consensus layer called Beacon Chain will be merged into the existing network.

A difficulty bomb is applied, making mining on mainnet pointless because new blocks are too difficult to mine. But that doesn’t mean miners should stop mining. A miner can mine an upgraded proof-of-stake version of his Ethereum, but cannot receive rewards or contribute significantly to block production.

For a proof-of-work version of Ethereum, miners would have to go back to mining Ethereum Classic, which has a much smaller ecosystem and lack the key dApps found on the Ethereum mainnet, or create a hard fork of the current mainnet. there is. Beacon chain merge.

New hard forks that maintain the Proof of Work consensus scheme can happen at any time. Anyone can fork Ethereum from GitHub at any time. Some believe that the proof-of-work version of Ethereum will continue and the proof-of-stake version will be a fork.

ETH User Confusion

Most of this confusion stems from the original language of The Ethereum Foundation’s The Merge, called ETH 2.0. This language has since been removed, allowing users to understand that non-custodial wallets do not require users to do anything.

If a user wants to participate in an Ethereum hard fork, they will need to add a new chain to their wallet, similar to adding a Polygon, Avalanche, Optimism, or BNB chain.

All of these chains are EVM compatible. This means it shares almost the same code as the Ethereum mainnet and is fully interoperable with the same public addresses used by all chains.

The new ETHPoW chain is like adding another EVM compatible chain, but all assets, smart contracts and tokens are cloned from the mainnet.

Difference between ETH and ETHPoW

One of the easiest ways to distinguish between Ethereum mainnet and ETHPoW is through ChainID. ChainID is a number that identifies the chain to dApps and smart contracts, allowing you to know which network you are interacting with.

However, the current GitHub repository containing the ETHPoW code still has the same ChainID as the Ethereum mainnet. Without changing this ChainID, dApps and smart contracts will not be able to recognize his ETHPoW chain. This is because the transaction may fail due to lack of consensus from validators using this ChainID.

Of even greater concern is the possibility of a “replay attack.” This causes transactions to be replayed on both chains, raising serious security concerns.

Now that the ChainID is confirmed to be 10001, users can ready their wallets once the proper RPC address is released to receive the ETHPoW airdrop.