Ethereum Community Protests ProgPoW Activation

A petition from the Ethereum community has appeared on GitHub calling for the refusal to activate the algorithm that would makeETH mining on specialized ASICs is ineffective.

After the announcement of the date for the integration of the ProgPoW algorithm, part of the Ethereum community expressed its objection to the update.

The petition was called EIP 2538, and it is alreadysigned by Amin Soleimani of Spankchain, Martin Keppelmann of Gnosis, Hayden Adams of Uniswap, Igor Lilik of ConsenSys, as well as a large number of Ethereum developers (ETH). The petition has already collected more than seventy signatures.

The document notes that all the mainchanges to the protocol should be widely supported by all interested parties. However, the EIP-1057 is clearly lacking this support. The decision to activate it was made by a narrow circle of developers.

The document noted:

Some stakeholders have suggestedthat ProgPoW does not provide a clear advantage for Ethereum's transition to PoS and may centralize hashing power. There is no evidence that it will serve its intended purpose – better alignment of miners' incentives. EIP-1057 failed to reach consensus in the Ethereum community after two years of debate that required significant developer attention and community bandwidth.

Vitalik Buterin also expressed surprise at the hasty decision to switch to ProgPoW this summer.

With this Ethereum coordinator James Hancock, oneone of the most consistent supporters of the upcoming update, said that ProgPoW is fully prepared for activation. Martin Svendé of the Ethereum Foundation is of the same opinion.