Ethereum miners continue to travel a difficult road that leads to the much-anticipated ETH merge. Here’s a brief check on how well-known miners are dealing with this ticking (time) bomb.
To-d0 list check
ETH miners will soon be replaced by PoS validators, which can reduce ETH network consumption by up to 99%. Needless to say, the revenue of the miners concerned is bound to be affected. ETH miners’ revenue fell by nearly $66 million after enjoying August figures of $750 million.
Here is a Glassnode graph showing the decline in revenue since January 2022.
Now, the question arises regarding the capture of the same by the miners. Mostly about how these operators will cope with this change. Ethereum’s second largest mining pool F2Pool was the latest to address this concern.
Specifically, the ETH miner will cease operations between 2022-09-10 and 2022-09-20. In a September 7 report, the operator further said,
“Our ETH pool will run as usual until the end of ETH mining. We invite you to continue mining using our pool of ETC, RVN, CFX, and more coins after the merge.”
Instead, mining pools will fully support ETC mining as Ethereum switches from PoW to PoS.
In addition, mining infrastructure companies Hive Blockchain and Hut 8 Mining Corp. also issued a notice explaining how their business aims to move away from Ethereum mining.
Even the biggest player, Ethermine, unveiled a new staking pool for users. Here, concerned members collectively have a chance to stake their ETH and earn 4.43% interest annually on top of their ETH deposits.
It is fair to say with the changing demographics for ETH, miners took a different approach to meet the demand. At the same time, the ETH miner community insisted on maintaining the current PoW consensus mechanism, mainly because the change would make their high-powered and expensive mining rigs redundant.
be careful
In any case, the arrival or departure of miners depends on the price of Ethereum. At the time of writing, ETH is facing a fresh decline of 10% to trade near the $1.5k mark.
Liquidity concerns could be anything from such an alarming shortfall.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, also faced a similar phenomenon. Recently, Poolin, one of the largest bitcoin mining pools by hash rate, halted withdrawals from its PoolinWallet due to liquidity issues.