The amount of Ethereum (ETH) currently held by miners has reached new record levels in terms of US dollars ($). The ETH miners remain reluctant to sell their tokens.
ETH miners don’t want to sell
The balance of Ethereum miners is the largest since the network launched five years ago. When converted to USD, it is at an all-time high of $1.85 billion, according to data from analytics platform Santiment.
Company stated on Twitter that the 532,750 ETH is the largest balance miners have since July 13, 2016. The amount is equivalent to about 0.45% of the total circulating supply of Ethereum, which is currently 117.8 million ETH.
Miners usually sell the asset regularly to cover costs, including electricity and hardware costs. A reluctance to sell suggests miners could wait for further price increases.
Hash rate not affected
Ethereum’s hash rate, often seen as a reflection of the network’s health and security, slumped along with Bitcoin’s during the exodus of miners from China. Ethereum’s hash rate dropped to 477 TH/s at the end of June. However, it has fully recovered in the past three months and soared to new peaks. It is currently up 150% since the beginning of the year.
That is despite the fact that the China-based Ethereum mining pools have fallen out of the race. SparkPool and BeePool have suspended operations for the past few weeks. Oddly enough, there has been no noticeable drop in hash rate that according to Bitinfo charts reached a record high of 745 terrahashes per second (TH/s) on October 5.
Cointelegraph reported in September that Ethereum miners had started hoarding assets in early August following the London hard fork. Research by the crypto exchange Kraken suggested that miners expected further price increases from potential deflationary properties after the launch of EIP-1559, burning some of the transaction costs.
Since the upgrade went live last August 5, according to Ultrasound.Money already burned 473,120 ETH, worth about $1.7 billion. In addition to the supply squeeze, a large percentage has also been wagered on the Eth2 Beacon Chain contract. According to the Eth2-explorer about 6.7% or 7.9 million ETH is set aside for staking. At current prices of about $3,577, this equates to about $28 billion.
