According to the announcement from the Ethereum Foundation, Ethereum is scheduled to start The Merge around September 15, 2022. As the world's first exchange to support Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, Poloniex will fully support the upgrade.
As new tokens may be created by the potential hard fork of the Ethereum Merge, Poloniex will take the following measures to reduce risks caused by price fluctuations and protect users' assets. Details are as follows:
I. ETH Deposits & Withdrawals
During The Paris execution layer upgrade, Poloniex will disabled deposits and withdrawals of ETH and ERC-20 tokens; the schedule as follow:
- ETH, WETH and ERC-20 tokens deposit and withdrawals will be disabled at 09:00 a.m. September 14, 2022 (UTC), we will enabled deposits and withdrawals for ETH once we deem the network to be stable;
Please make deposits or withdrawals in advance to avoid any inconvenience. After The Merge is completed, Poloniex will resume ETH and ERC-20 token deposits and withdrawals. Please follow our latest announcements for further details.
II. ETH Spot Trading
- Spot trading of ETH and ERC-20 tokens will not be affected. As The Merge may be accompanied by high price volatility, please carefully assess the risks involved before making any transactions.
III. ETH Contract Trading
- ETH perpetual contracts will be available for trading as usual;
- The maximum leverage of ETH perpetual contracts will be adjusted to 20x;
For more details, please refer to Plan on ETH Perpetual Futures Contracts During Ethereum Merge
IV. The Merge
The Merge may end with two possible scenarios:
- Scenario 1: No new tokens are created
- Poloniex will resume deposits and withdrawals of ETH and ERC-20 tokens as soon as possible. Please follow our announcement for the latest updates;
- Scenario 2: New fork tokens are created
- We have noticed that several communities plan to support the fork chain and retain the PoW consensus. Poloniex itself has no preference for the fork chains supported by different communities. Poloniex will assess the validity of ETH fork assets and support their distribution, deposits, and withdrawals right away. Technically, the PoW chain with the most hashrate, strongest community consensus, and safest code will be deemed the valid fork;
- If The Merge ends with more than one valid fork chain that stably generates new blocks, Poloniex will support the distribution, deposit and withdrawal of all valid forked tokens and will review the feasibility of supporting the trading of such tokens before giving further updates.
- Poloniex will take a snapshot of all users' ETH and WETH balance on September 14, 2022 at 11:00 (UTC) and the fork tokens will be distributed accordingly at a 1:1 ratio based on ETH snapshot balance; Poloniex reserves the right to update at its own discretion the plans on The Merge and the potential fork tokens.
- Users' net ETH balance in the spot and futures accounts will be snapshotted;
- To better protect Poloniex users, all potential fork tokens will go through the same strict listing review as all other assets on the platform do, and Poloniex does not guarantee the successful listing of the fork tokens.
For more information, please see:
Note: Poloniex does its best to keep the market stable. We reserve the right to make reasonable modifications and adjustments to the above arrangements according to the market trends. Please check out our latest announcements for more information. The potential new chains arising from the uncertain Ethereum fork may terminate service due to insufficient computing power or a possible lack of support from developers or community members. This may cause either of the fork tokens to lose value or be delisted from Poloniex. Poloniex does not guarantee the value of any fork tokens. Please be prudent before making any decisions.
The Poloniex Team
September 11, 2022