Ethereum miners might just have a ticking clock above their heads now, that is to say, a Merge countdown clock. Well, miners could keep mining ETH up until the timer hits zero. But do miners still see a profitable future within this domain?
End-game stress
ETH miners would soon be replaced with PoS validators, which could cut the ETH network consumption by 99%. Between 10-20 September, the blockchain would shift as part of the Merge from a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism for block creation to a proof-of-stake (PoS) system.
Following this, PoW mining on Ethereum will no longer take place. Are there any repercussions? Well, hundred percent.
Ethereum miners’ revenue continued to see a massive fall, at press time. As per the analytics platform Glassnode, the revenue reached a 1-month low count of $754,483.90.
Source: Glassnode
The beginning of September did, indeed, create a havoc scenario for the miners who still enjoyed their August success. Ethereum miners generated $756 million in revenue in August, up 37% from July’s $545 million in revenue.
Just over $30 million of that amount constituted transaction fees — that is, ETH paid for transactions in the blocks — with the rest as block subsidies to miners, according to data collected by The Block Research.
However, at present, the figure depicting monthly revenue fell around $66 million after enjoying August’s stats.
Source: The Block
The revenue on a daily scale too reiterated the same bearish pitch. In addition to this, miners did suffer a major setback. Ethermine, the largest ETH miner, made an important announcement.
It stated that the mining pool would switch to withdrawal-only mode once the Proof-of-Work (PoW) mining phase is completed.
Fair to say, miners would need to shift to a different coin in order to carry out their mining operations.
Time to say goodbye?
Well, the ETH PoW community received support from multiple exchanges, such as Poloniex exchange, which has already listed two potential hard fork tokens on its platform.
The Ethereum PoW community is continuing its efforts as it released the first batch of contracts to freeze.
