Ethereum proof-of-work hard fork will launch 24 hours following the Merge on September 15, according to a Twitter thread published by ETHW. They also divulged the precise timing of the fork would be announced 1 hour before its launch, with all data “including the final code, binaries, config files, nodes info, RPC, explorer” to be “made public when the time’s up.”. The Merge will see the Ethereum mainnet switch its consensus mechanism from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, removing the energy impact from PoW mining. Ethereum miners will be supplanted by validators, which drove miners to launch the Ethereum PoW fork to continue running the old PoW network.