Try Quests to earn cryptoEthereum Flash Bounty: Miners Moving?
Outline
In this report, we are taking a look at the miners’ reaction to Ethereum merge. Miners are an essential part of the any decentralized blockchain platform. They are in charge of processing and validating the transactions. In return for their contributions, they receive a incentive/prize know as the gas. The Ethereum merge that occurred on September 15, 2022, was a transition of the Ethereum network from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake mechanism.
Proof-of-work is a mechanism in which the miner uses a high energy consuming devices (usually GPUs or ASICs) to perform mining. This was a highly energy consuming process.
Instead, in the proof-of-stake mechanism, the miner stake his/her ETH to be eligible for winning a part of blocks’ prizes. As mentioned in the Ethereum organization’s newsletter, it will reduce the energy consumption of the whole network by about 99.95%.
Unique Number of Miners - Daily
The figure on the right shows the number of unique miners that were successful in mining blocks since January 2022.
The number of unique miners were almost 50 since January, but a sudden increase (~x10) occurred on September 2022, the the of the merge.
The trend continued for the past three days (until the day of writing the report).
Did Old Miners Continue They Work?
In order to find the top miners, we looked for top 100 miners with the highest number of mined blocks. Then we took the cumulative number of blocks that these 100 miners, mined from a month ago. The result is the figure on the right.
We can see that the total number of blocks that these 100 miners, mined had an stable trend for the past month, but suddenly decreased on September 8 and continued decreasing until September 15, which we suspect it was the result of announcement and the actual execution of the merge.
How About the New Miners?
We also want to know about the new users, those who never mined a block before the merge.
Our observations:
- We have found that 1022 new miners joined the game after September 2022, and since then, mined about 17,900 blocks on Ethereum network.
- We can also see the new miners’ activity since the merge. Every day since the merge, the new miners mined more than 5,000 blocks.
Unique Number of Miners - Hourly
In order to dig deeper in the effect of the merge, lets take a look at the final week since the merge.
Looking at the hourly statistics, we can see that the total number of miners indeed increased when the merge happened.
But these are the total number of miners. We are also interested in knowing whether the old miners stayed with the ecosystem or not.
Total Number of Mined Blocks
We have also looked at the total number of blocks that were mined before and after the merge.
As the figure on the right shows, the total number of blocks was almost stable from the beginning of year except for two periods.
- From May to July, when the whole market experienced a crash.
- From August to September, when the number of blocks decrease, that can be both because of the market situation and the announcement of merge. But the number of mined blocks dramatically increased since the merge.
Conclusions
In this report, we looked at the effect of Ethereum merge on the miners of this network. We have found that:
- The total number of miners increased significantly since the merge.
- Old miners’ activities decreased because of the merge.
- About 1,000 new miners joined the network since the merge.
- The total number of mined blocks increased since the merge.
It is also worth mentioning that before the merge, the proof-of-stake were alive and under test, on the Beacon Chain and the word “merge“ refers to merging these two networks, the Ethereum main network and the Beacon Chain, together.