Methodology

• We try to determine the mining stats by looking at ethereum.core.fact_blocks table and the data before block_number 15537351
• We look at various metrics to answer the question, like:
  • Number of Unique miners mining blocks every day.
  • Number of Blocks mined every day.
  • Average Block size mined every day.
  • Average Block difficulty mined every day.
  • Average Transaction Count per block mined
• We also dig around various sources for definitions and see where the miners are going.

Number of Unique miners mining blocks every day

• The number of unique miners mining blocks every day has actually stayed quite consistently around 90 right up to the merge block.
• This means the same number of miners were still mining until the very last block.

Number of blocks mined every day

• The number blocks mined every day has actually see a very slight decline right up to the merge.
• We do the number of blocks mined from July 1, 2022 go down from 6.45K to 5.9K on Sep 14, 2022.
• That is a 8.6% decline in the number of blocks mined daily.

Average Block Difficulty every day

• Difficulty is a measure of how difficult it is to mine a block in a blockchain for a particular cryptocurrency. A high cryptocurrency difficulty means it takes additional computing power to verify transactions entered on a blockchain—a process called mining.[1]
• This means that if miners are moving away we should see a decrease in the block difficulty being mined, since there is less competition.
• We do see the average block difficulty decreasing right around July 1, 2022, which means the miners started leaving around that time.

Average Block Size every day

• Block size refers to the size of a block of code representing a recent chain of Ethereum transactions. At a given point, an Ethereum block is added to other blocks to form a continuous chain, which facilitates the authentication of Ethereum transactions.[2]
• This means bigger the block size more computation power it takes to mine the block.
• What we see is that this number has been slowly decreasing right up to the merge as well, which means miners are not willing to spend much effort in mining.

So where are the miners going ?

• Ethereum Classic, a hard fork of the Ethereum network, saw its hash rate soar to a record high on Thursday morning shortly after The Merge was completed. Hash rate is the computational power used to approve transactions on a blockchain, a mechanism called proof-of-work. Following The Merge, Ethereum is switching to a consensus method called proof-of-stake. Instead of competing with powerful computers and essentially chips, node operators stake their cryptocurrencies to win the chance to validate transactions.[3]
• As per the Hash Rate increase of Ethereum Classic seems like miners are fleeing to the Ethereum Classic and mining blocks there. *
• So miners never really stopped mining they just moved to Ethereum Classic it seems.