Grayscale Still Deciding What To Do With ETHPoW

The investment management company will extend its review period by an additional 180 days

article-image

Maurice NORBERT/Shutterstock.com modified by Blockworks

share

Cryptocurrency investment management company Grayscale will extend its review period to determine whether or not it should acquire and sell proof-of-work Ethereum.

Grayscale was tasked on behalf of shareholders to determine whether it should purchase and sell the proof-of-work fork of Ethereum (ETHPoW) after the Merge.

Read more: Proof-of-Work vs. Proof-of-Stake: What’s the Difference?

The initial review period needed to determine the utility and value of ETHPoW was expected to last less than 180 days. The company revealed on Thursday that it would extend this review period for an additional 180 days.

“The trading venues for the ETHPoW tokens have not yet been broadly established, and there is continued uncertainty both as to whether digital asset custodians will support the ETHPoW tokens and if trading markets with meaningful liquidity will develop,” the company said in a statement.

Specifically, Grayscale noted that the value of the token is likely to fluctuate significantly for a period of time if digital asset custodians choose to support the token and a trading market develops.

“As a result of this uncertainty, as well as the potential for significant volatility in prices for the ETHPoW tokens, it is not possible to predict whether Grayscale, as agent, will be able to acquire the ETHPoW tokens or the value, if any, that Grayscale, as agent, will be able to realize from sales of the ETHPoW tokens,” the company said. 

Following the Ethereum hard fork, which moved the network from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, the price of ETHPoW soared to $51.45 and then plummeted. It is currently trading at $3.40, according to information on CoinGecko.

ETHPoW has severely underperformed both ETH and Grayscale’s Ethereum Trust

Read more: Ethereum Switches to Proof-of-stake After 7 Years of Work

Ethereum proof-of-work enthusiast are still active on the chain. Recently noting in a tweet that there had been “impressive NFT projects” emerging on the network.

Despite this, it noted that due to the lack of funding and coordinated efforts in the ecosystem, the proof-of-work chain has not yet been able to escape its infancy stage. 

“​​If this situation continues to develop, developers, investors, and project parties may gradually lose confidence, and the entire ecosystem will gradually slip from existing NFT projects to a vacuum,” the network tweeted. 

A proposal to develop a EthereumPoW ecosystem DAO is underway, with the goal of encouraging more user activity on the chain.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

Hilton Park Lane

Tues - Wed, November 10 - 11, 2026

DAS London is a two-day summit at the Hilton Park Lane in London featuring conversations between the builders, allocators, and policy makers who are shaping the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the UK, Europe, and North America.

Marina Bay Sands Singapore

Wednesday, October 07, 2026

DAS Asia is a a single-day summit at Marina Bay Sands Singapore featuring conversations between the builders, investors, and global leaders are shaping the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in Asia & North America.

recent research

Black Generic.png

Research

Compute demand is two-sided, the precondition for any hedging market. Producers (neoclouds and independent data centers) fear their inventory clears below cost. Consumers (inference platforms and the agentic application layer) fear compute will get more expensive. The common read holds that nonfungibility keeps both off any general exchange, since a buyer wants a named SKU in a named region rather than a basket, so the trade stays bilateral and the only exchange users are dealers hedging their book. That describes launch conditions, but understates how commodity markets form. Canonical benchmarks get made through trading, and reservations standardize as the curve deepens. The dealer-intermediated structure is not the end state, it is the seed of one.

Newsletter

The Breakdown

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Blockworks Research

Unlock crypto's most powerful research platform.

Our research packs a punch and gives you actionable takeaways for each topic.

SubscribeGet in touch

Blockworks Inc.

133 W 19th St., New York, NY 10011

Blockworks Network

NewsPodcastsNewslettersEventsRoundtablesAnalytics