The Tron co-founder even suggested that Tether and Circle — the two biggest stablecoin issuers — may even reconsider their support for Proof-of-Stake.
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A vocal critic of The Merge has claimed the Ethereum community will miss Proof-of-Work when it's gone.
Speaking to the CoinMarketRecap podcast, Justin Sun even suggested that Tether and Circle — the two biggest stablecoin issuers — may even reconsider their support for Proof-of-Stake:
"People will start to realize that Proof-of-Work is essential to a smart contract platform."
Sun went on to warn that more Ethereum smart contracts could get censored in the future — and large staking providers such as Coinbase will be given a dilemma: Censor transactions, or face shutting down their business.
Bankless co-founder David Hoffman has questioned this — and argues Coinbase isn't as centralized as some believe. In his eyes, customers delegate ETH to this exchange, and they'll vote with their feet if something happens that they don't like.
"If Coinbase starts to censor transactions or does something that their customers feel misaligned by, the customer will just take their Ether back, which they own, and then reroute it to a different exchange."
PoW: A Very Good Opportunity?
The Tron founder is supporting a Proof-of-Work hard fork so mining can continue, and he suggested developers have a "very good opportunity" to build new infrastructure.
Chainlink, which offers oracles that provide smart contracts with real-world data from external sources, has previously said it is backing The Merge. Sun cited oracles as one of the things that will need to be rebuilt.
"If any oracle team right now supports a Proof-of-Work network… every developer will use their oracle feed. So that's why I think this is also a good opportunity for the developers if they really want to develop on the network. Also you will get lots of free traffic, and a free user base."
The Merge is going to deal a huge blow to miners because they'll no longer generate income by verifying transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. Instead, that responsibility will fall to validators.
Miners battling for a Proof-of-Work hard fork have been criticized — and a common question centers on why they can't use Ethereum Classic, which is going to remain PoW, instead.
But Sun argues that only 660,000 addresses exist on Ethereum Classic, while this new Ethereum fork will have 200 million addresses.
"I'm also optimistic about the Proof-of-Work user base… I think millions or tens of millions of addresses will be used in the [PoW] protocol."
He predicted that an Ethereum hard fork has the potential to become the dominant chain within five to ten years.
