The Question

Analyze any notable trends or outliers you can see since ETH switched to POS.

Compare this to user behavior in the days and weeks leading up. What major changes can you see?

Approach

In this dashboard, the following topics will be analyzed in time range -10 to +10 days from merge date (Sep 15th) .

• Mining actions
• NFT Mints
• NFT Sales
• ETH Transfers
• Swaps
• Deposits and Withdraws - Aave

On Sept. 15, a few minutes before 3 a.m. Eastern time, Ethereum switched from using energy-intensive technology to a more sustainable system in a major update called "the merge." In the hours following the merge, the price of Ether, or ETH — the platform's native cryptocurrency — held relatively steady.

This technological overhaul of the world's second-most valuable cryptocurrency by market cap was years in the making. [1]

With the implementation, blocks of new transactions went from being verified by computers solving massively difficult math problems to a system that uses financial incentives and penalties to accomplish the same task. This change could reduce the network's power consumption by more than 99.95%.

The Merge is an upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain, which powers innovations in the crypto ecosystem like non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

What is proof-of-stake (PoS)? [2]

Proof-of-stake underlies certain consensus mechanisms used by blockchains to achieve distributed consensus. In proof-of-work, miners prove they have capital at risk by expending energy. Ethereum uses proof-of-stake, where validators explicitly stake capital in the form of ETH into a smart contract on Ethereum. This staked ETH then acts as collateral that can be destroyed if the validator behaves dishonestly or lazily. The validator is then responsible for checking that new blocks propagated over the network are valid and occasionally creating and propagating new blocks themselves.

Proof-of-stake comes with a number of improvements to the now-deprecated proof-of-work system:

• better energy efficiency – there is no need to use lots of energy on proof-of-work computations
• lower barriers to entry, reduced hardware requirements – there is no need for elite hardware to stand a chance of creating new blocks
• reduced centralization risk – proof-of-stake should lead to more nodes securing the network
• because of the low energy requirement less ETH issuance is required to incentivize participation
• economic penalties for misbehaviour make 51% style attacks exponentially more costly for an attacker compared to proof-of-work
• the community can resort to social recovery of an honest chain if a 51% attack were to overcome the crypto-economic defenses

MINING

Looking at the obtained results and presented graphs, it is quite clear that after the merge, the number of daily miners has greatly increased and has reached from about 50 per day to about 500, that is, 10 times. The number of transactions also shows a jump on the day of the merge and a few days after that, and after a few days it has become more balanced. Therefore, with transactions remaining constant and miners increasing, the number of transactions per miner has decreased drastically.The number of blocks shows a relatively significant increase since the day of Merge. So that from about 5500 blocks per day, it has reached more than 7000 blocks daily.==Therefore, it can be concluded that mining activities after the merger have become more concentrated and facilitated.

NFT MINTS

According to the charts, daily unique nfts minted, with a positive slope until the merge day and after that continued and gradually increased. The total number of minted NFTs in ten days ending September 15, 17k and in 10 days after It has been close to 22K and this is a significant increase.The number of minters as well as transactions related to MINT have also increased drastically. ==Therefore, it can be said that Merge has made a good impact on NFT MINTING.

NFT SALES

In the field of NFT SALE, in terms of all metrics, that is, the number of sales, the number of buyers, the number of sellers, the number of tokens, etc., there is a good increase after the merge compared to before. But in terms of sales value, we see a slight drop. Considering the increase of all factors except the dollar value of sales, the significant decrease in the value of Ethereum can be attributed to this issue.

SWAPS

• Findings

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• According to the results, daily unique swappers show the same rate in both studied times. But in terms of dollar value, after Merge, we see a significant improvement

• In terms of the daily average number of swaps for each user, the presented graph shows a steady and stable growth. Therefore, it can be said that merger has had a positive effect in the field of swaps and has led to its increase and prosperity.

ETH TRANSFERS

In the case of ETH Transfers, the presented results do not show much difference in any of the metrics before and after the merge. We can only mention the two days before and after the merger that the amount of transfer reached its highest level in the studied period.

Deposits & Withdraws - Aave

In this section I have reviewed deposits and withdrawals from/to Aave, one of the largest financial platforms on Ethereum.

Surveys show that both withdrawals and deposits have decreased in terms of value and volume. As a result, it can be said that in the ten days leading to the Merge and the ten days after that, the activities in Aave have decreased, and maybe this is due to the shock to the users, and they are currently evaluating the situation to make the right decision.