EtherZero Team Cancels Plans to Hard Fork Ethereum

In the world of cryptocurrency, hard forks are seemingly the new altcoins. More specifically, a lot of developers want to hard fork existing currencies rather than build their own coins from scratch. In the case of Ethereum, one of those hard forks was known as EtherZero. However, this fork has been canceled due to a “lack of community support and big trading platforms”. It’s a very interesting decision, although few people will mind that the fork will not happen after all.

EtherZero hard Fork is Canceled

It is evident that Bitcoin was subject to quite a few hard fork attempts in 2017. Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold are perhaps the most notorious ones, even though Bitcoin Gold is very different from both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. It is evident that this way of creating currencies will affect altcoins in the future as well. While the concept of taking existing code and turning it into a new project is not uncommon, it seems developers are far too keen on creating hard forks and airdrops right now. That’s not a favorable course of action by any means, as most of these hard forks serve no purpose whatsoever.

The first altcoin to have received such hard forks/airdrops is Ethereum. Given Ethereum’s position in the world of cryptocurrency, that is not entirely surprising. It is evident that people like what this project has to offer and wish to make a quick buck from introducing so-called hard forks. Moving away from the original codebase for no apparent reason usually means the new fork is just a money grab which serves no real purpose. This is very different from how Ethereum Classic was created, as this currency exists due to ideological differences between parts of the Ethereum community regarding the “bailout” of The DAO.

The first major Ethereum hard fork which was set to occur in 2018 is EtherZero. Although most people are still unaware this project even exists, the goal was to introduce this fork on January 19. Once the Ethereum network reached a block height of 4,936,270, the EtherZero fork was to go into effect. Those plans have now been canceled, which is not exactly a big surprise. After all, there was very little buzz regarding this fork and how it would potentially affect Ethereum itself.

Unfortunately, the team behind EtherZero decided to throw in the towel more than two weeks prior to the launch of this initiative. In a way, that is a big relief to anyone who supports Ethereum, as it seemed that projects such as EtherZero would only give Ethereum a bad reputation. There was little to no interest from the community in this hard fork, and no major trading platforms had any intention of supporting this new coin. Again, no real surprises there, as EtherZero wasn’t going to serve any purpose whatsoever.

This doesn’t mean the team has given up on their plan to issue ETZ to the masses, though. Instead of using a hard fork, the team is now contemplating having an initial coin offering. A new currency name will be chosen in the future, and a rebranding is in order as well. How all of this will play out remains to be determined, though. After all, the EtherZero website looked anything but professional, mainly due to many spelling errors and other inconsistencies. It is evident this project will be met with further scrutiny regardless of how the team decides to market it.

It is evident there may not be much value in creating an Ethereum hard fork. Most such projects have no value, serve no purpose, and shouldn’t even be traded on exchanges. It is good to see most trading platforms take an aggressive stance toward projects like EtherZero. We can only hope people give up on the concept of hard forking existing currencies without any real reason, as it only creates unnecessary confusion.