As we all know, Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain by market cap, is about to undergo a massive transformation known to the crypto community as “the Merge”. It’s going to be just one more scheduled ETH upgrade aimed at reducing the current blockchain’s energy consumption by about 99% by switching its transaction verification system away from “proof-of-work”. The event is set to occur between September 10 and September 20.

Because a campaign has emerged to fork, or split, Ethereum and preserve an alternative, proof-of-work version of the network, rumors abound that there could be a situation where all digital assets currently built on the Ethereum platform would be duplicated come the merge. In other words, the “real” versions of NFTs and stablecoins will exist on the post-merge, proof-of-stake Ethereum network, but copies of those assets will also exist on the new, forked proof-of-work network, if it materializes. Those copies will likely be worth far less than their legitimate counterparts on the Ethereum network, but the owners of these assets could still be tempted to sell these surplus tokens for some meager payday.

However, although many crypto investors are worried about the event affecting well over half of all decentralized finance activity and that some funds and NFTs would go missing, developers assure there’s nothing to worry about as the whole process was tested long time ago, so the Merge is not expected to wreak havoc on asset security or app functionality.

Meanwhile, the Poloniex crypto exchange has already prepared for the Ethereum hard fork. This allowed potential ETH forks to be de facto traded. For Poloniex clients, the opportunity of exchanging ETH for possible forked tokens is open. Poloniex has allowed trading of potential forks of ETH, ETHS (ETH2) and ETHW (ETH1) and listed TRON-based ETHS and ETHW. Prior to the official ETH 2.0 update, ETH holders on Poloniex can go to the exchange page to exchange their ETH for two “potentially forked” tokens, ETHS [IOU] and ETHW [IOU] at a 1:1 ratio.

Since June of this year, the share of ETH in the cryptocurrency market by capitalization has been growing significantly. Currently, the cryptocurrency holds almost 20% of the total market capitalization. Whereas, the market share of Bitcoin has been declining lately. The market share of BTC is 38.88% and the share of ETH is 19.48%. Ethereum is trading at $1,588 at the time of writing, up 0.29% in the last 24 hours.

Meanwhile, the price of Ethereum Classic is $31.93, down 1.13% in the last 24 hours. However, if there are any issues with Ethereum’s transition to a Proof of Stake mechanism, ETC could see high demand.