FTX Will Not Halt or Settle ETH Futures Prior to Merge

FTX has revealed that it does not have any plans to halt or settle ETH futures prior to the highly-anticipated, Merge.

• In a recent announcement on Tuesday, the crypto derivatives exchange revealed that its Ethereum futures and perpetual contracts (ETH-0930, ETH-1230, ETH-PERP) will track the proof of stake Ethereum after the Merge.
• It further added,

“we will do our best to support continuous trading.”

• A move away from the existing proof of work (PoW) mechanism is expected to make the network cheaper, faster, and environmentally friendly. The income stream for the miners, however, will come to an end. The Merge would essentially eliminate a massive chunk of rewards for contributing to the blockchain.
• As a result, some Chinese miners have proposed a hard fork that would enable miners to continue to support a new, parallel PoW version of the chain despite Ethereum undergoing the Merge.
• The opposition has been criticized by many Ethereum proponents that believe a forked PoW version of Ethereum could be harmful to the entire ecosystem, but Tron Founder Justin Sun appears to support the idea.
• Chainlink, on the other hand, notified developers and dApps that it will not provide support for forked versions of the Ethereum blockchain after the shift from PoW to PoS.
• It also added that the move aligns with both the Ethereum Foundation’s as well as the wider Ethereum community’s decision, achieved through social consensus.
• Those developers and dApp teams on the Ethereum network who are still hung in limbo in terms of their next move when it comes to the Merge should halt their smart contract operation, Chainlink said.