Introduction

Mining is the process of creating a block of transactions to be added to the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum, currently uses a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism. Ethereum miners - computers running software - use their time and computation power to process transactions and produce blocks. Proof-of-stake will soon replace proof-of-work as Ethereum's consensus mechanism [source].

What’s in this dashboard?

In this dashboard, we explore the behavior of Ethereum miners in terms of their preferences over block transaction count. Specifically, we’ll look at whether certain miners prefer low or high-transaction blocks over the other.

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Scope of Analysis

• Miners

  • Out of the 5,600+ total miners, we’ll only pick miners who have been active relatively recently (mined at least 1 block since 2021). This is to exclude miners who were only active during Ethereum’s earlier years which are not representative of today’s typical block.

  • We’ll only include miners who have mined at least 50 blocks within the block scope below. This is an arbitrary criteria chosen to ensure each miner analyzed has enough data samples for us to make behavioral observations.

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• Blocks
  • We’ll only include blocks starting on Jan 1, 2021. This is to have some consistency between the average number of transactions per block (~179 per block).

Overview: Miners

Overview: Blocks

Miner Preference: Block Transaction Count

Conclusion

In summary, we have observed the following:

1. There are at least 9 miners who prefer mining blocks with low transaction counts (75% of blocks have below 179 transactions).
2. There are at least 3 miners who prefer mining blocks with high transaction counts (75% of blocks have more than 179 transactions).
3. No miner has exclusively mined high-transaction blocks.

• On a typical day, there are between 50 to 60 active miners mining blocks on Ethereum.

• The number of transactions per block has grown throughout the years.
• Since 2021, the average TX count per block is around 170-180 transactions.

• The middle half of blocks have 106 to 255 transactions (IQR).
• The median TX count per block is 179 transactions.

• As of Sep 2022, approximately a total of 5,620 unique miners have mined at least 1 block on Ethereum.

Method

Characterizing Miner Preferences

1. For each miner, we’ll use the distribution of TX counts for all blocks they have mined.
2. To highlight obvious miner preferences, we’ll use 75% of mined blocks as a threshold, e.g.
   • High-TX preference means at least 75% of mined blocks are high-transaction blocks.
   • Low-TX preference means at least 75% of mined blocks are low-transaction blocks.
3. For extreme (exclusive) preference, we’ll use a stricter 95% threshold.

Definitions

• Low-TX block. These are blocks which have less than 179 transactions (median).
• High-TX block. These are blocks which have more than 179 transactions (median).
• Low-TX miner. A miner whose 75% of blocks mined are low-TX blocks.
• High-TX miner. A miner whose 75% of blocks mined are high-TX blocks.
• High-TX-only miner. A miner whose 95% of blocks mined are high-TX blocks.

Chart details:

• This scatterplot summarizes the typical range (IQR) of TX counts of blocks mined by each miner.
• x-axis represents the lower end of IQR.
• y-axis represents the upper end of IQR.
• Bubble size represents the number of blocks mined by each miner.
• Color shows a worded summary of miner preference.

Observations

1. There are clear outliers in the lower-left and upper-right sections of the scatterplot.
2. They are the low-TX miners (orange) and high-TX miners (green) respectively.
3. Majority of miners lie in the middle of the pack. They exhibit no clear preference and are mining a wide range of blocks.

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Do certain miners prefer mining blocks with low transaction count?

• Yes, at least 9 miners have displayed clear preference for low-transaction blocks.
• Miner 0xfad45a9ab2c408f7e6f8d4786f0708171169c2c3 has mined 229 blocks, 75% of which had no more than 63 transactions each.

Do certain miners prefer mining blocks with high transaction count?

• Yes, at least 3 miners have displayed clear preference for high-transaction blocks.
• Miner 0x6a86bbe22d73cbf0df82ef96d78d99ce585e690c has mined just 21 blocks so far but 75% of which had at least 261 transactions.

Do certain miners only mine blocks with high transaction count?

• Using our 95% criteria, there is no miner which has exclusively mined high-TX blocks only.
• Miner 0x6a86bbe22d73cbf0df82ef96d78d99ce585e690c is the closest fit to this criteria but still does not qualify.

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