Small change, large effect: one move from Binance pumped ETHW, here's the takeaway…

There was some interesting price movement yesterday.

ETHW - the proof-of-work fork of Ethereum (aka the blockchain that uses Ethereum's old way of doing things) - was up ~12%.

Ok, ok, short term price movement is a total snooze fest, but the mechanics that caused it are worth understanding.

Because it shows just how influential the whims of a crypto exchange can be - and gives us a glimpse of what mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency could do for the market in the long term.

Right, so, remember The Merge? And the whole: ‘we’re moving from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS), making ETH 99.99% more energy efficient’ thing?

A few months back, a group of people proposed creating a duplicate of the old Ethereum blockchain (via a 'hard fork') that would keep the old PoW mining industry alive.

That ended up happening, and with it EthereumPoW (ETHW) was born.

It initially flopped, falling from ~$140 at its peak, down to $4.17 at its lowest point (oooft!).

But today it’s up. All on the back of Binance announcing that they would allow their customers to join a mining pool for ETHW.

Mining pools are formed when groups of crypto miners decide to share computing power to collectively have a better chance of processing a transaction (and earning crypto in return).

Binance gives its users the chance to join pools through its service, Binance Pool.

The weird thing is: ETHW isn’t actually an approved coin on Binance; so any ETHW mined, needs to be converted into BUSD, USDT or some other crypto in order to be withdrawn (which Binance charges a fee for - cheeky).

Key takeaway: without even accepting the token itself, Binance added $100M to the market cap of ETHW.

Which shows that even the tiniest bit of support from big companies, can have a massive effect on the crypto market.

(Imagine what would happen if a company like amazon were to start accepting cryptocurrency).