The PoW Landscape in the Aftermath of The Merge
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Author / Producer
Date
2025
Publication Type
Conference Paper
ETH Bibliography
yes
Citations
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Abstract
On 15th September 2022, The Merge marked the Ethereum network’s transition from computation-hardness-based consensus (proof-of-work) to a committee-based consensus mechanism (proof-of-stake). As a result, all the specialized hardware and GPUs that were being used by miners ceased to be profitable in the main Ethereum network. Miners were then left with the decision of how to re-purpose their hardware. One such choice was to try and make a profit mining another existing PoW system. In this study, we explore this choice by analyzing the hashrate increase in the top PoW networks following the merge. Our findings reveal that the peak increase in hashrate to other PoW networks following The Merge represents an adoption of at least 41% of the hashrate that was present in Ethereum, with 30% thereof remaining over 5 months later. Though we measure a drastic decrease in profitability by almost an order of magnitude, the continued presence of miners halts claims that power consumption was instantly addressed by Ethereum’s switch to PoS.
Permanent link
Publication status
published
External links
Book title
Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2024 International Workshops
Journal / series
Volume
14746
Pages / Article No.
281 - 292
Publisher
Springer
Event
5th Workshop on Coordination of Decentralized Finance (CoDecFin 2024)
Edition / version
Methods
Software
Geographic location
Date collected
Date created
Subject
Blockchain; Proof-of-work; Mining; Ethereum; Measurements
Organisational unit
03604 - Wattenhofer, Roger / Wattenhofer, Roger
Notes
Conference lecture held on March 8, 2024.
Funding
Related publications and datasets
Is new version of: 10.48550/ARXIV.2310.01028