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In just over a month’s time, The Merge will likely be implemented on the Ethereum blockchain, and the network’s proof-of-work (PoW) miners will be forced to mine another coin. So far, ethereum miners seem to stick with the PoW Ethereum chain until the very end as profits have increased. While Ethereum will change its consensus rule set, a large number of crypto community members are trying to guess where the hashrate will go after The Merge transition.
On August 11, 2022, Ethereum developers informed the community during a Consensus Layer Call livestream that The Merge will most likely happen on or around September 15-16. The next day, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin confirmed that The Merge is likely to happen on September 15. “The terminal difficulty is set to 587500000000000000000000. This means that the ethereum PoW network now has a (roughly) fixed number of hashes left to mine,” Buterin so.
Since then, the question everyone has been asking is where the current Ethereum hashrate will go after the transition takes place. There has always been a lot of speculation that most of the ETH hashrate will move to Ethereum Classic (ETC), but that is not everyone’s opinion. Besides the proposed ETHW fork that is expected to happen, which could very well take a fraction of the ETH hash rate, there are crypto coin supporters who expect their chain will get extra security. We also don’t know how much hashrate the potential proof-of-work Ethereum fork called ETHW will get after The Merge.
A supporter of the crypto asset project ravencoin (RVN) expects the RVN network to get a boost. “If there was ever a time to own ravencoin, it’s right now,” he so. “Thousands of ethereum miners will move to ravencoin due to end of mining next month for [Ethereum]. The next 2 years are huge for RVN.” However, so far there have been no meaningful transitions from the Ethereum network to any Ethash blockchains such as RVN and ETC.
There was one significant hashrate drop the ETH network experienced, and it started on June 6th. Statistics show that on that day there were 1.23 petahashes per second (PH/s) or 1230 terahashes per second (TH/s) dedicated to the ETH chain. The data shows that approximately 230 TH/s has left the network, but none of the Ethash-supporting blockchains have seen an accumulation of hash of this magnitude.
The reason is that mining ETH is still very profitable, compared to mining alternative Ethash support chains. Data shows that Bitmain’s Antminer E9 gets an estimated $60.55 per day with electricity costs of $0.12 per kilowatt hour (kWh). Bitmain’s machine is 2,400 megahashes per second (MH/s), and Innosilicon’s A11 Pro with 1,500 MH/s can fetch an estimated $34.53 per day with energy costs of $0.12 per kWh. Currently, a large number of the top ETH mining pools are also breaking the ETC chain. Some of ETH’s top miners also contribute hashrate to Ravencoin’s 2.31 TH/s and Ergo’s 11.95 TH/s.
With profits like these and the new Antminer E9 released during the first week of July, it is more than likely that miners mining ether will stick with the ETH chain until the end. While ETH lost 230 TH/s, ETC on July 4, 2022 saw a small spike as 7.12 TH/s was added to the network since then. JPMorgan’s latest weekly fund flow note, published on Wednesday, explained that The Merge transition could be volatile for ETH miners and ETC could reap the rewards. The investment bank noted that ETC saw a hashrate increase in July, and the weekly fund flow note also highlighted alternative cryptoassets using Ethash such as ergo and ravencoin.
What do you think about The Merge and how miners will have to make a choice in 32 days when it comes to choosing an Ethash supporting blockchain? Let us know what you think about this topic in the comments section below.
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