Introduction

Ethereum finalized 'The Merge' at block #15537393 on September 15, 2022, in this dashboard we’re going to analyze the Miners behavior before Ethereum’s switch to Proof of Staking Consensus Mechanism which led to a 99% drop in electricity usage by this blockchain.

---

In This Dashboard…

we’re going to analyze different aspects of miners activity on chain and answer the following:

How have miners reacted to the fast-approaching merge?

Have they stopped mining in recent weeks?

Evidence of miners either stopping work or continuing to mine.

==the time frame for this analysis is since the start of 2022.==

Observations & Insights

looking at top daily miners chart and comparing it to overall daily miners and mined chart we can see that the daily top 8 miners are accountable for about 75% of daily total block production and as we got closer to the Merge event there wasn’t any notable change in number of blocks mined by top Miners and they continued to mine up until the last moment.

as we can see, ==starting late April although the number of miners didn’t change but number of produced blocks started to decline==, this happened because of the implementation of Difficulty Bomb in purpose of disincentivizing PoW mining and encourage the switch to Staking, as Ethereum Foundation delayed the Difficulty Bomb by a Hardfork to buy some time for finalizing The Merge, the ==daily block production restored== to what it was before the month of May.

so in short, the recent decline in daily block productions was not a consequence of miners leaving the PoW mechanism as everything restored to what it was before the surge happening in difficulty.

---

Verdicts

• Miners Moving? NO.
• Miners didn’t have any notable reaction to merge.
• Miner didn’t stop mining and the decline in block production was due to rise in difficulty of mining blocks.
• top two mining pools collectively account for 50% of produced blocks.
• Ethermine Pool accounts for almost 30% of daily mined blocks.

Methodology & Related Sources

• i used Flipside Crypto’s core_facts_block for my analysis and obtained the labels for each miner through Etherscan.
• Ethereum Difficulty Bomb Explained
• Delay of Difficulty Bomb

My Discord: moshiri#7927 Telegram: @whoisvahid