Method :

1. using ethereum.core.fact_blocks to identify miners and tx_count in each blocks.

2. Miners are divided into 3 categories based on the total blocks that were mined :

   1. Top Miners (Rank Between 1 to 30)
   2. Mid-tiers Miners (Rank Between 30 to 70)
   3. Low-tiers Miners (Rank Bigger than 70)

3. In the analysis, to differentiate the miners who have continued or stopped their activity, their activity before September 2022 and their status after September are considered.

Analyzed time period: from beginningof 2022 to Merge date (2022-09-15)

1.Statistics:

Since beginning of 2022 1091 miners have mined 1.637 million blocks and 295 million transactions.

2.Analysis:

1.What was the status of Top miners facing Merge?

It seems that most of the top miners have been mining up to the last few weeks, but 4 miners (pools) have suspended their activity, the most prominent of which are EZIL-pool and BTC.com-pool.

from 30 top miners , 26 miners (86%) were still active until the last day, and 4 miners (13.3) stopped their activity.

Conclusions :

1. Most of the top miners and mid-tier of 2022 have continued mining Ethereum until the last day.

2. Most small miners have stopped mining in the last two weeks leading up to the Merge.

3. Miners have not started staking Ethereum on ETH2.

4. Miners plan to mine $ETC, $RVN, $FLUX, $ERGO.

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Introduction :

The Merge is a planned Ethereum network upgrade that removes the proof of work consensus layer and merges the Beacon Chain’s proof of stake network into the current Ethereum mainnet.

Ethereum’s consensus mechanism is a contribution to the network following Eth1. Eth1 was known as the execution layer. This will soon be deprecated as we migrate towards Eth2, now renamed The Merge.

Primarily The Merge will focus on the execution of upgrading the consensus mechanism and  bringing it in line with its original mission: to migrate from proof of work to proof of stake, validate transactions on the blockchain, and add new blocks.[source]

Historically, the flow of new miners appears to be slowing as we get closer to the Merge date.

The peak of new miners was reached in the months of June, July and August 2018 and the trend of the number of new miners decreasing from 2021 is quite evident.

As mentioned earlier and shown in the chart below, top miner activity has not decreased significantly from the beginning of the year to the last week before the Merge.

2.How mid-tier miners encountered Merge.?

It can be said that the mid-tier miners continued their activities until the last day, but more of them stopped their activities compared to the top miners.

from 40 mid-tier miners , 29 miners (72.5%) were still active until the last day, and 11 miners (27.5%) stopped their activity.

3.How low-tier miners encountered Merge.?

The situation is different here, as most small miners stopped mining in the last two weeks before the Merge.

from 79 low-tier miners , only 13 miners (16.4%) were still active until the last day, and 66 miners (83.5%) stopped their activity,

4.Have they started staking Ethereum?

Out of all the miners who were active in 2022, only 2 addresses have stacked in ETH2.

One of them has staked 30 ETH in Lido and the other has started a Node by sending 32 ETH to the ETH2 contract.

5.Whats left for Ethereum miners after The Merge.?

it seems that after Ethereum Pow ends, many miners plan to mine $ETC, $RVN and possibly $FLUX or $ERGO.

the day the merge happened, the hash rate of these coins increased by a large percentage, showing that miners went to these coins, also some of them are engaged in mining the ETH-PoW fork that occurred after the Merge.