Metrics

In order to provide insight into the behaviors of the miners leading up to the merge, three metrics will be used:

• The daily number of unique miners: If miners have stopped mining leading up to the Merge, we should see a downtrend in the daily number of unique miners.

• Daily average of blocks mined per miner: It could also be the case that miners have not completely stopped mining, but simply have decreased their capacity leading up to the merge. The daily average number of blocks mined per miner should provide insight into this.

• The hourly average time between blocks: If enough miners stop mining, it will take longer to find miners that want to validate the blocks. In that case, we should see an increase in the average time between blocks.

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Introduction

On September 15th, Ethereum successfully performed “The Merge”. Ethereum successfully transitioned to the Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus model. With Proof of Stake, transactions are validated by users that have a big ‘stake’ in the network, meaning they have a considerable amount of ETH. Previously, using the Proof of Work model, miners were the ones validating transactions. The transition to Proof of Stake has made the miners obsolete.

This dashboard aims to provide insight in the behaviors of miners leading up to the merge. Have miners stopped mining in recent weeks leading up to the Merge?

Methodology

• The daily number of unique miners:

  Calculated using the ethereum.core.fact_blocks table by counting the daily number of distinct miners per day.

• Daily average of blocks mined per miner:

  Calculated using the ethereum.core.fact_blocks table. First, we calculate the number of blocks mined per miner per day since 30 days before the merge. Then, we calculate the average number of blocks mined per miner per day.

• The hourly average time between blocks:

  Again calculated using data from the ethereum.core.fact_blocks table. First, we calculate the time between each block for the last 7 days. This was done using abs(datediff('second', block_timestamp, prev_block_time)). The variable prev_block_time was calculated using the lead function in Snowflake SQL.

Observations & Analysis.

When looking at these three metrics, we can see that seems to be no change in trend in the weeks preceding the merge. This is surprising as the merge will render the miners obsolete. Therefore, it would be expected that we see a change in miner behavior leading up to the merge. However, the metrics show otherwise. There is no change in trend in the number of blocks mined per miner and the number of active miners stayed constant as well. One explanation for this could simply be that miners want to make use of their mining equipment “while it lasts”.

Key Findings

• The daily number of unique miners leading up to the merge seemed to be stable at around 50.
• The daily average number of blocks minded per miner is also stable at around 120 preceding the merge.
• The hourly average time between blocks also stayed constant leading up to the merge at around 14-15 seconds.
• From this, we can conclude that miners have not changed their behavior leading up to the merge.