Crypto Miners Look for Alternatives As Ethereum Merge Completes
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- Blog
- September 22, 2022
Crypto Miners Look for Alternatives As Ethereum Merge Completes
Ethereum (ETH) converted to the Proof of Stake (PoS) mechanism from its Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism on September 15. This transition did not prove to be smooth for Vietnam’s cryptocurrency miners. They incurred significant losses with their mining equipment as it shut down.
After Nigeria, at 32%, 21% of Vietnamese rank second in the use or mining of cryptocurrency, according to recent survey statistics. But the Merge upgrade led to huge losses for crypto miners.
The hunt for alternatives
The Ethereum protocol upgrade requires lesser energy to validate transactions. One does not need powerful coin minting equipment for solving challenging mathematical computations due to the adoption of the new Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus process, rendering the equipment worthless.
A considerable number of miners thought of continuing mining with a renowned faction headed by Chandler Guo to create ETHPoW (ETHW). At the time of writing, ETHPoW is trading at $5.42; ETHW is down 27.82% in the last 24 hours.
However, EthereumFair (ETF originally ETHF) came in before ETHPoW and focused on Ethereum’s proof-of-work consensus. Comparatively, though, EthereumFair received little attention and is run by a group of Chinese miners.
According to the block explorer of Ethereum Fair, ETF has 1.8 million wallet addresses and 6.9 million total transactions. ETF traded at $4.64, down 41.93% in the last 24 hours. On the other hand, ETHPoW tokens maintained 86.3 million addresses and recorded 1.7 billion transactions.
The merge also led to Ethereum Classic, which was forked off of Ethereum in 2015, having a surge in hashrate. The current hashrate of ETC is 192.09 TH/s, the highest being 227.95 TH/s, recorded on the Merge day.