Ethereum Merge and PoW Token

The Ethereum Merge is scheduled to take place on 13 September.

ETH holders will soon be airdropped ETH PoW tokens.
What is the best strategy to get airdrop token regardless of its value and growth potential?

What is happening?

Ethereum is going through an upgrade where it will transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake.
After the transition, ETH miners can no longer mine.
Miners are forking ETH to keep a PoW version to keep continue mining. You may already notice the future of this coin.

The things to do

• To get the ETH PoW tokens, you must first hold ETH on a wallet that supports this fork.
  The best would be to have full custody of your ETH on a hardware wallet
  If you are holding ETH on an exchange, your exchange may or may not support you for the fork tokens.

  For exchanges that support the fork, this is probably the easier option as you get the fork tokens without doing work.
  Ideally, the exchange supports the trading too. Some exchanges may take months before crediting your account. Do check your exchange policy on the upcoming Merge

• Bridge all your tokens back to ETH mainnet
  You will not be getting any ETH PoW for your ETH held on Solana, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, Avalanche, any other Layer 2 scaling solution or non-EVM chains.
  Move them back to mainnet before the Merge to get the ETH PoW tokens.

• Unwrap all WETH to ETH
  There will most likely be a DEX on the new ETH PoW chain to help you unwrap your WETH PoW token but why bother searching for it in a new unstable ecosystem?
  Just unwrap it before the Merge. The best risk free way is to get hold of the ETH PoW tokens immediately

• Remove liquidity from DeFi protocols
  You will not be getting any ETH PoW tokens for ETH that are being used to provide liquidity.
  It may be good for the perspective of getting PoW token to withdraw now and provide liquidity again after the Merge.
  There may be a liquidity crunch on DeFi protocols as more folks do this. Another mess may happen.

• Borrow ETH from Aave / Compound
  You will get ETH PoW for any ETH held during the snapshot.
  This means it makes sense to borrow as much ETH as possible. Combined with the previous step, I would expect ETH utilization to get close to 100%.

  Snapshot of Aave & Compound:
  

  

• Monitor stETH / ETH market
  You could either buy or sell stETH as we get closer to the Merge depending on what others are doing. Would expect some to sell stETH to ETH to get the PoW airdrop. But if selling becomes too strong, you could buy stETH on the cheap. Last 30d chart:

• Buy the rumor, sell the fact
  Maybe speculating on ETH PoW is not worth it for you. Currently, ETH PoW IOU is trading at about 2.8% of ETH. ETH will probably be bought up in the hours to the Merge and dumped immediately after. You can choose to sell ETH and take profit then.
  

We have about 10 days to go to the Merge.
I think many markets and protocols will get volatile, messy, and complex especially in the hours before/after Merge.

One or more ETH PoW forks may show up.
We can see many forks of bitcoin in the past.

We maybe be eligible to get all these fork tokens, if we I hold ETH on non-custodial wallet.
Be careful. This doesn't mean we could claim all airdrops as some could be scams trying to get my signature/keys. you could lose all to get some valueless tokens.

There are several strategies and opinions around Ethereum merge. All should take their own plan. And be careful.

Source: Coingecko