Introduction

What is the Ethereum Merge?

The Merge is a technical upgrade that will shift Ethereum’s existing proof-of-work consensus mechanism to a proof-of-stake model. With this move, Ethereum aims to significantly cut its carbon footprint and lay the groundwork for future scalability upgrades.

What does an Ethereum miner do?

What is Ethereum Mining? Ethereum mining is the process of creating and generating new Ether (ETH) coins and verifying transaction blocks. Once this is done, the blocks are added to the immutable blockchain ledger.

Is Ethereum mining still possible?

Since Ethereum has switched to a proof-of-stake model, mining Ether will no longer be necessary. Due to this, mining machinery will become obsolete, leaving miners with fewer options.

1- General Information

What the graphs show:

Based on the results, the number of daily active miners has seriously decreased during these six years since 2016.

The second diagram of the daily chart shows the number of daily active miners in the last two months. This graph shows that the number of active miners has not changed much and has always fluctuated at around 50 active miners daily.

2- Miners’ behaviors

2-1 Difficulty & Fees

An overview of this article

In this article, we discuss the issue of Ethereum and its impact on Ethereum network miners. What is certain is that after the completion of the transfer process of Ethereum from "Mining" mode to "POS" mode, the work of miners will also end. This article has two main parts:

Part 1: General information about Ethereum miners

Part 2: Behavior of miners in the months close to Merge

Definitions:

block:

Blocks are batches of transactions with a hash of the previous block in the chain. This links blocks together (in a chain) because hashes are cryptographically derived from the block data. This prevents fraud, because one change in any block in history would invalidate all the following blocks as all subsequent hashes would change and everyone running the blockchain would notice

Difficulty:

Ethereum difficulty (or network difficulty) is a key value for every cryptocurrency. Ethereum Network difficulty is the difficulty of a problem that miners must solve to find a block. The more miners are mining Ethereum the more difficult it is to find the block to be rewarded

Date: 2022-09-17

2-3 Miners groped by transactions per block

2-4 Top Miners activity

What the graphs show:

Among all Ethereum miners, ETHERMINE is the best miner in this field and has mined more than 3.2 million blocks so far.

After Ethermine, there are SparkPool and F2Pool.

Some of these miners are composed of several large miners, for example, ETHERMINE IS THE WORLD'S HIGHEST PERFORMING ETHEREUM MINING POOL.

The number of transactions made by top miners has recently decreased significantly compared to last year.

In the last two months, the number of transactions made by top miners has decreased compared to four months ago, although Ethermine has performed slightly more transactions.

The same trend is seen for the number of mined blocks by the top miners.

In the days leading up to the Ethereum Merge, although the top miners did not stop their activity and continued to work until the last day, it seems that they have slightly reduced their activity, although this decrease in activity is not very significant.

What the graphs show:

Miners tend to make blocks with the least number of transactions.

Blocks with a number of transactions between 100 and 200 have the highest number of miners.

Blocks with a number of transactions above 1400 have the lowest number of miners.

The highest amount of fee corresponds to blocks with a higher number of transactions of 100.

• The number 100 is assumed to be a criterion for the number of high or low transaction blocks.

What the graphs show:

The daily chart of the network difficulty shows that the change in Ethereum network difficulty has been continuously increasing during this six-year period.

In the last two months, the difficulty of the network has not changed much, although the trend has been increasing, and by the time of the day of the Ethereum Merge, it has increased from 11 to 12.

The average gas of Ethereum has decreased relatively during the last four months and has recently reached 17 on average.

2-2 Miners size & numbers

What the graphs show:

The total number of miners has been increasing over the past six years, although since 2019, their number has increased slightly.

The number of new miners has also gradually decreased and has reached its lowest level in recent months.

What is obvious is that in the last two months, as we are getting closer to the Merge time, the number of new miners has decreased, which indicates that new miners are not interested in this field.

The size of the blocks has recently decreased significantly compared to the same short and long term.

Conclusion

In this articlewe focused has two main parts:

Part 1: General information about Ethereum miners

Part 2: Behavior of miners in the months close to Merge

The results shoed that:

• In the period of time close to Merge, the number of active miners has not changed much and has always fluctuated at around 50 active miners daily.
• In the last two months, the difficulty of the network has not changed much, although the trend has been increasing, and by the time of the day of the Ethereum Merge, it has increased from 11 to 12.
• In the last two months, as we are getting closer to the Merge time, the number of new miners has decreased, which indicates that new miners are not interested in this field.
• The size of the blocks has recently decreased significantly compared to the same short and long term.
• Miners tend to make blocks with the least number of transactions.
• Blocks with a number of transactions between 100 and 200 have the highest number of miners.
• In the last two months, the number of transactions made by top miners has decreased compared to four months ago, although Ethermine has performed slightly more transactions.
• In the days leading up to the Merge, although the top miners did not stop their activity and continued to work until the last day, it seems that they have slightly reduced their activity, although this decrease in activity is not very significant.

This analysis using Flipside Crypto was created by HaiRong#0117 to answer the following questions:

How have miners reacted to the fast-approaching merge? Have they stopped mining in recent weeks? Show evidence of miners either stopping work or continuing to mine.

Twitter: HaiRong0117