Ethereum miners record a boom in earnings in July

miners ethereum

For the third consecutive month, Ethereum miners’ earnings surpassed Bitcoin’s, reaching $571 million in July.

Ethereum miners surpass those of Bitcoin

Ethereum’s big rises over the past month, which have seen the crypto exceed $1,700, have also caused gains by cryptocurrency miners to soar, surpassing those of Bitcoin for the third consecutive month.

Earnings from mining ETH, which underpins the operation of the Ethereum blockchain network, were $571 in July. The gains made by miners are even more astonishing considering that Ethereum’s hashrate, as opposed to Bitcoin’s, has been declining for some time. It actually reached 176,000 GH/s in June, while at the end of July 2018 it hovered at an impressive 280,000 GH/s.

Evidently, however, these figures do not take into account the fact that Ethereum has jumped more than 60% in just a few weeks, after declines at the beginning of the year had brought the price below $1,000. 

All this on the eve of the new update, the Merge, which will result in a change in the validation system from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. However, the Merge is causing a rapid migration of miners to Ethereum Classic, which has been benefiting from weeks of double-digit rises.

This fork of Ethereum will, in fact, retain the PoW system, and Buterin himself spoke of it in positive terms at the Paris conference:

“It’s a very welcoming community. If you like proof of work, you should go use Ethereum Classic, it’s a totally fine chain”.

Comparison with profitability from Bitcoin mining

Ethereum’s revenue was still slightly down from June’s, while that of Bitcoin was up.

According to some experts, the release of Merge, scheduled for 19 September, will not bring about the end of mining and the companies that carry out this very energy-intensive activity, but only a migration toward coin staking, which by some calculations is expected to have returns in excess of 10%.

Daniel Hwang, head of protocols at Stakefish, a leading staking pool, said:

“The transition from mining to staking requires business development, customer service, communication with core developers, customer teams, software, redundancy”.

Ethereum’s largest mining pool, EtherMine, has also been transitioning its business model toward staking of Ethereum for the past few weeks. The company has just launched a beta version of EtherMine Staking, a service that precisely specializes in the staking pool.

The problem then will only arise for individual miners, who will no longer have annuities and will have to sell their machines, perhaps to mining pools themselves, to switch to staking or move to other cryptocurrencies. 

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