Justin Sun backed EthereumFair, a PoW failure down 75% in a month
Billionaire Justin Sun was the most influential promoter of EthereumFair (ETHF), one of Ethereum’s many proof-of-work (PoW) forks during its merge to proof-of-stake (PoS). EthereumFair opened for trading one month ago on Poloniex at $3.66, and its price has lost three-quarters of its value, to $0.82 today.
Like most activities on Justin Sun’s flagship Tron, EthereumFair was coded in Chinese and is led by a group of Chinese miners.
Although no coin listing service has been able to verify its supply, EthereumFair self-reports a market capitalization of $98 million. Most exchanges and data aggregators like CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko use the ticker symbol ETHF. A few exchanges use ETF.
Ethereum’s merge to PoS occurred on September 15, 2022. Hours later, EthereumFair joined the ranks of minor Ethereum alternatives, like EthPoW, that forked away to keep running Ethereum’s original PoW algorithm.
By September 16, ETHF traded for a nose-bleeding $20.59. It soon dropped to under a dollar and is currently trading below $0.82. All other PoW continuations of Ethereum, like EthPoW, have declined without exception. Many were pre-mined scams.
- EthereumFair’s marketing strategy involved objecting to Ethereum’s purely PoS algorithm, arguing it ran the risk of becoming overly centralized.
- Instead of airdropping EthereumFair to ETH holders, the developer team planned to drop it to holders of Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Ether Classic, and an obscure micro-cap asset called ClassZZ.
- EthereumFair’s website indicates that the digital asset has more than 200 million addresses, 50 million contract addresses, and 1.6 billion transactions. Beyond that, it doesn’t provide much information.
Its Twitter account oddly bragged about ETHF-denominated listings of Bored Apes. Its blockchain does support an NFT marketplace with inconsequential trading volume.
Justin Sun’s two favorite exchanges list EthereumFair
Poloniex and Huobi were the two main exchanges to list EthereumFair. Justin Sun is a major investor in Poloniex and a major tokenholder in Huobi Token (HT).
Sun started accumulating HT in 2013 and owns “tens of millions” of them. He also recently took a position as an advisor for Huobi.
Read more: The evolution of Ethereum 2.0: Your questions answered
Sun denied plans to acquire the exchange in the wake of news that founder Leon Li planned to sell his majority stake in the exchange. The mergers and acquisitions division of Hong Kong-based About Capital Management acquired Leon Li’s stake.
Some reports indicated that Sun backed the acquisition as a core investor in About Capital Management. Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX denied any involvement in the deal.
When Poloniex proclaimed that EthereumFair might win the hashrate competition for post-Merge Ethereum forks and become the longest PoW ETH chain, Poloniex switched its EthereumPoW (ETHW) trading pairs over to EthereumFair and gave it the ticker symbol of ETF. However, Poloniex also warned that it might delist EthereumFair if it joins the long list of abandoned blockchains.
Read more: Is Justin Sun’s huge Huobi stash linked to $3 billion buyout?
Poloniex’s move surprised some observers since EthereumFair didn’t even have EthereumPoW’s relatively larger support. EthereumPoW founder Chandler Guo called it a mistake.
EthereumFair traded over $15 on Poloniex on September 16, 2022. CoinMarketCap indicates that it rapidly plummeted to under $2 barely a day later.
Protos could not confirm how much EthereumFair Sun might have held — or if he even had any. Third parties connected to Sun might have traded EthereumFair with knowledge of Sun’s endorsement, but these are only rumors.
If Sun or his associates were involved in trading EthereumFair, he would not have been the first influential figure to pump a minor digital asset so that he or his associates could sell it for a tidy profit.
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