A week ago, the Ethereum blockchain switched from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS). Ethereum fans have been waiting for this upgrade codenamed “the merge” for a few years now, but that seems to be the problem. It was too obvious that the upgrade was underway, and now miners are left with huge amounts of ETH tokens. Some information suggests that they are about to sell.
Sell ETH miners
That writes Bankless in one report to subscribers. After the upgrade, miners have become completely redundant, but they do sit on huge amounts of ether. Some miners will choose to sell their inventory and other company assets – ETH tokens will be no exception.
“Miners dumping their ETH is something we have to go through in the coming months before we continue with the ‘up-only mode‘, but it’s guaranteed to happen,” Lucas Campbell said in the article. Lucas Outumuro from IntoTheBlock explains something similar. Miners are now moving to other blockchains where they can continue their mining operations as they sell their ETH holdings.
On-chain data from among others OKLink confirms this. Miners have sold around 19,000 ETH in less than a month. At the time of writing, there is about 245,000 ETH left, while the balance of miners is slowly increasing again. You could attribute this to any miners returning as strikers, but there’s no hard evidence for that.
Ethereum not popular anymore for miners
According to Outumuro, an airdrop for miners could also be a cause for the exchange inflows. After the merge, miners came up with a fork that would preserve the Proof-of-Work aspect of Ethereum, a move some miners thought was inevitable.
Unfortunately, this fork turns out to be less successful than some hoped, and one ETH miner even stated that 90% of the miners would go bankrupt. Ethereum is therefore not too popular for miners anymore. Dogecoin is now even the second largest PoW coin, after Bitcoin (BTC).