Ethereum continues to account for a significant share of fake coins. This also applies to miners. In 2021, Ethereum miners earned $3 billion more than their Bitcoin counterparts. This year, however, the positive narrative around ETH miners has taken a big hit.
Are the miners out yet?
Well, the first thing is the high-profile Merge. A merger would force Ethereum's $19 billion mining industry to find a new home. This will shift ethereum's consensus mechanism from proof of work to proof of equity.
Another reason is ongoing encryption fixes. Ethereum lost 72% of its value, which means miners' earnings will take a big hit. According to Glassnode, a blockchain analytics firm, miners' earnings fell to alarmingly low levels.
Ethereum miners' earnings were down 27% from April. It's worth noting that ethereum mining brought in $1.39 billion in total revenue in April 2022. Ethereum mining also saw a year-on-year decline in May. Well, revenue in May 2021 was about $2.4 billion, while the 2022 figure is down 57%.
Overall, falling ETH prices and the impending merger have forced some miners to disconnect their RIGS. The decline in ETH network difficulty is depicted or rather highlighted this fall. As ETH prices have been in free fall recently, so the value of mining proceeds has plummeted, this processing capacity has fallen by more than 10%.
In the year-to-date chart, miner activity dropped to about 900 TH/s after peaking at 1,000 TH/s in June this year.
On top of that, rising electricity prices around the world are making things worse. Electricity bills often account for a large portion of miners' day-to-day costs, and higher prices can cut into their net profits.
Naturally, factors such as reduced ethereum computing power have hurt miners' profit margins. So they disconnected the GPU (graphics processing unit).
Graphics card prices continued to fall in June, plunging another 14 percent, according to data from tech media Tom's Hardware.