:pick: Ethereum Miners

As Ethereum prepares for its much anticipated merge and transition to proof of stake in the coming week, let’s take look at our dedicated miners of Ethereum one last time

Miners and mining

Mining is the process of creating and adding blocks of transactions to the Ethereum blockchain. Miners solve computationally difficult puzzles to produce blocks and secure the Ethereum network from attacks.

**Scope of our analysis**

• Do certain miners prefer mining blocks with lower transaction count?
• Do certain miners only mine blocks with high transaction count?
• You can define what can be considered low or high transaction count based on the transaction count distribution

Approach

The ethereum.fact_blocks table was used for this analysis. The fact_blocks table contains block-level data for the Ethereum Blockchain including the miner, difficult level, and tx per count.

The Ethereum blockchain has upgraded and changed over the years. Here, I explore the distribution of transaction counts per block each year and the 10, 25, 50, 75 and 90th percentile in terms of tx per block.

For each miner, we then classify it based on the 25th and 75th percentile of the tx per block mined and categorize their mining categories.

==Yearly transaction counts on Ethereum have been increasing.==

Generally, we see that the total tx count on Ethereum has been rising over the years.

At the time of analysis in September, the tx volume was already high than what was clocked in 2018.

What is considered a low/high transaction count per block?

This depends on which year you are talking about.

Here, we examine the percentile of the tx per block by year and all time. If the 25th percentile is at 10, this means that the first 25% of all blocks ordered by tx will have at least 10 transactions.

As transactions prior to 2018 have a different distribution, we will only examine data and miner activity from 2018 onwards for a fair comparison.

The 10th and 90th percentile from 2018 onwards will be used as a bench for what is high or low transactions counts per block

• Low: Below 25th Percentile (<=77 tx per block)

• High: Above 75th Percentile (>=200 tx per block)

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We will profile the miners using the above cut-offs from 2018 onwards.

==The distribution of transactions per block on Ethereum is skewed, with most blocks having a low transaction count.==

When plotting the number of transactions per block by year, we see that most blocks have low (< 200) to no transactions (note that y-axis is on log10 scale).

We can also see the activity of Ethereum by the tx per block over time, where the block tx upper limit has been progressively increasing over the years. In 2021, the max tx per block has reached > 1.4k.

What are the possible permutations for the type of miners?

There are four possible categories

• Miners that only mine low tx count per block
  • The miner’s max and minimum tx count mined per block is below the lower percentile benchmark
• Miners that only mine high tx count per block
  • The miner’s max and minimum tx count mined per block is above the upper percentile benchmark
• Miners that mine both high and low tx count per block
  • The miner’s max tx count mined per block is above the upper percentile benchmark and the minimum tx count mined per block is below the lower percentile benchmark
• Other miners
  • Those who don’t fall into the above categor, they are in the middle zone because they don’t go for low nor high tx count per block

How have blocks mined over time changed?

Let’s start with a high-level overview.

The distinct number of blocks mined daily has been rather consistent from 2022 onwards, within the range of ~6k blocks daily.

Dips in blocks mine, particularly the one seen in 2022, correspond with the long draw down in ETH price over time.

How do Ethereum miners rank? Which category is the most abundant?

From 2018 onwards, there have been 1764 unique miners.

In terms of abundance, first up, we have low tx miners

These miners only ever mined blocks with transaction counts below the 25th percentile. Over 46.7% of the miners were classified here. It is also important to note that most of them only ever mined a single block. Points that lie on the straight line in the scatterplot below mostly only mined 1 block.

Secondly, we have those with both low and high transaction counts per block.

Over 27.2% were classified as High & Low Tx Miners. These are so-called indiscriminate miners, meaning they mined blocks with both high and low numbers of transactions. We will expect the range of tx count per block these miners mine to be wide.

Next, we have the middle-ground miners

A sizeable portion (22.5%) of them are kind of in the middle ground. They don’t go for extremely high tx count per block nor do they go for those from the lower end.

Lastly, we have the selective and high tx count per block miners

Interestingly, only a small minority (3.68%) of the miners were concentrated at the tail end as high tx count miners.

Key Findings

• There was a large proportion of miners who only ever mined 1 block
• The majority of the miners are those that go for low tx count per block, only a smaller subgroup are those who exclusive mine blocks with high tx count.