Why Is PulseChain Forking Ethereum?

If you’ve transacted on Ethereum anytime in the last 12 months or so, you’ll know the main reason why billionaire crypto founder Richard Heart decided to fork the network — gas.

When Ethereum was originally built, it was intended to be a faster, cheaper and more secure alternative to Bitcoin, with transaction fees (referred to as ‘gas fees’) costing just a fraction of a penny. But fast forward seven years and Ethereum has become a victim of its own success.

Due to its flexibility and ease of use for developers (and NFT creators) the Ethereum network’s popularity has resulted in it becoming majorly congested, driving gas fees through the roof and pricing out small-time investors from Ethereum-based projects.

Frustrated by these extremely high gas fees hampering the adoption of his project Hex, Richard Heart decided to ‘hard fork’ the Ethereum network. However, unlike previous forks of Ethereum, PulseChain will launch fully loaded, with all existing tokens copied across to the new network.

Just in case you’re hearing of this for the first time, this means you will soon get a free copy of all your ERC20s on a cheaper, faster network. Pretty cool, right?

As the saying goes, a job worth doing is a job worth doing well. So instead of simply forking Ethereum exactly as it is, Richard Heart challenged his development team to improve upon the legacy Ethereum code during the process. Let’s take a look at the improvements that PulseChain will bring.

More environmentally friendly

Unlike Ethereum and Bitcoin which both use Proof of Work, PulseChain will employ a newer, much more environmentally friendly consensus mechanism called Proof of Stake.

Instead of relying on expensive mining equipment (which is extremely energy-intensive to run), Proof of Stake revolves around a process called ‘staking’, where ‘validators’ stake a certain amount of crypto behind the block they want added to the chain.

To promote honest network participation, validators receive rewards for doing the right thing, and penalties (known as slashing) for doing the wrong thing, including going offline.

Faster block times

Since Proof of Stake allows transactions and blocks to be approved without the need for solving complex equations, it allows for much greater scalability and higher throughput than Proof of Work.

To put some numbers around that, compared to Ethereum’s ~13 second block times, PulseChain’s block times should sit around 3 seconds, making for significantly faster transactions. No more sitting around twiddling your thumbs while you wait for your transactions to go through.

Shares Ethereum’s load

By removing pressure from Ethereum, PulseChain will help give the legacy network the bandwidth it needs to finally move to Proof of Stake and the much anticipated Ethereum 2.0. When this will actually happen is anyone’s guess, but PulseChain will almost definitely beat Ethereum 2.0 to market, with some PulseChain enthusiasts already cheekily suggesting that PulseChain is Ethereum 2.0.

Allows small players to participate

Right now, swapping one ERC20 into another on Ethereum can cost well over US$100, and a simple send can cost well over US$30. These fees make the network untenable for smaller investors but they are fairly inconsequential to bigger investors, which really goes against the idea of blockchain technology democratizing finance.

When newbies and smaller investors can once again dip their toes in the water without paying through the nose, DeFi will be able to continue growing into the truly world-changing technology it promises to be.

How can you prepare for PulseChain?

Right now, there’s no official date for PulseChain mainnet, but one thing to do is make sure your ERC20s are in a wallet that you have the keys to — and NOT on an exchange like CoinBase — before the fork happens. If your ERC20s are on an exchange at the time of the fork, you will miss out on your free copies.

PulseChain testnet has been live since the 29th September last year. If you haven’t already, why not add the testnet RPC settings to your MetaMask and take a look around?

Don’t miss out on the Liquid Loans sacrifice phase

Very soon we will launch a sacrifice phase where you will be able to make a political statement against corporate-owned, censorable, centralized stablecoins, and express your desire to see something better emerge on PulseChain. Should you choose to participate in this sacrifice, you must have no expectation of profit derived from the work of others. To learn more, go to thesacrifice.io or join our highly active community on Telegram.

Disclaimer: Please note that nothing on this website constitutes financial advice. Whilst every effort has been made to ensure that the information provided on this website is accurate, individuals must not rely on this information to make a financial or investment decision. Before making any decision, we strongly recommend you consult a qualified professional who should take into account your specific investment objectives, financial situation and individual needs.