Proposal: Determine action in the event of a PoW Fork

This will appear on Snapshot on Sunday, September 4th.

FOR: Disable the Bancor contracts on a PoW fork (trading, adding and removing liquidity) AGAINST: Do nothing in the event of a PoW fork

TLDR:

• The Merge is coming on September 15th
• Miners have indicated they may create a proof-of-work fork
• The Bancor DAO should determine its course of action in the event of a fork

Overview

The Ethereum migration to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, “The Merge,” is coming on approximately September 15th. The current status can be seen here: https://797.io/themerge/. More information about The Merge and how it relates to Bancor can be found in this post: https://gov.bancor.network/t/analysis-of-bancor-the-merge/4042

A faction of Ethereum miners have indicated that they will create an Ethereum proof-of-work fork. This initiative appears to be an attempt for miners to squeeze additional value out of their mining equipment. While there may be some level of activity on the proof-of-work chain, the vast majority of users, developers, and protocols will continue with the proof-of-stake chain.

Course of Action

The end result of this is the necessity to make a decision on whether the Bancor DAO should disable the contracts on a proof-of-work fork, or do nothing. Below I've outlined the main arguments for each option.

Disabling Contracts

This option would include disabling all Bancor platform functions on an Ethereum fork. This option should incur little to no risk. The main argument for this is that most tokens on a proof of work fork will quickly become worthless, which would result in the Bancor platform being drained of any value that could be extracted on the forked chain.

Do Nothing

This option would be to do nothing in the event of an Ethereum fork. This would incur no risk to Bancor on Ethereum Mainnet, however, any value that could potentially be extracted from an Ethereum fork would be quickly lost.