Hardware wallets will take a similar approach to Ethereum's potential hard fork

Forked coins have proven to be lucrative in the past. Ethereum holders came to own an equivalent amount of Ethereum Classic when it forked in 2016.

The Ethereum blockchain merger is expected to take place around 05:05 UTC on September 15th. This is a significant milestone that marks a full transition to Proof of Stake (PoS) for Ethereum and eliminates the need for 99.9% mining against Proof of Work (PoW). /p>

Some miners are also preparing for a hard fork that would allow them to continue using consensus PoW. Forked coins have proven lucrative in the past. Ethereum (ETH) holders, for example, came to own an equivalent amount of Ethereum Classic (ETC) when it forked in 2016.

In the event of a new hard fork, in which the Ethereum blockchain splits into two different networks, users holding ETH on the chain would have an equal balance of ETHW on the forked chain. This would be an additional token; a totally different asset from ETH.

For ETH holders using hard wallets, the question is simpler: what would happen to your tokens if a fork follows the merger? We've put together some answers to this question, so you don't get lost or trapped in a scam in the hours ahead.

In fact, most hard wallet providers take the same approach: monitor adoption in the new chain as well as the forked chain before adding support for ETHPoW. Also, they warn that there is no need for user intervention during the upgrade.

Charles Guillemet, CTO of security hard wallet Ledger, explained to Cointelegraph that, “in the event of a fork, the first thing everyone should know is that all assets the user currently owns on the mainnet are secure," adding that the company "will not support an ETH Proof-of-Work fork on Day 1, as there are a number of technical aspects that need to be assessed to ensure it is secure for users, the main one being to make sure that the new chain is secure."

Similarly, Josef Tětek, bitcoin analyst at Trezor, said that "Trezor Suite will not support interaction with pre-merger proof-of-work post-merger, but users can still use their Trezor with a third-party interface like MetaMask to access the old version of the blockchain."

Tangem, a Swiss wallet provider, also has no plans to support PoW forking. "Until we...