Ethereum miners earn $1B in May; Is this goodbye?

Lavina Daryanani
Source: COINQUORA

Ethereum’s preparation for its shift from PoW to PoS has been going on in full swing. The launch date has, undoubtedly, been pushed but the development team has consistently been putting in efforts towards fructification. At this stage, notably, dress rehearsals on the Ropsten testnet are going on.

Once the transition happens on 8 June, the whole mining process would become irrelevant to the ecosystem. So, this means that miners just have a few days of jobs left before being eliminated.

At this stage, as expected, the aggregate revenue earned has been stooping lower, indicating that miners have already started leaving the network. Per data from The Block, miners fetched an aggregate of $1.01 billion as revenue in May.

As illustrated below, the same is currently at a multi-month low level. When compared to April, Ethereum’s revenue decreased by 27% from $1.39 billion to the current levels. Ethereum mining also saw a year-over-year monthly decline in May. Last year in May, $2.4 billion in revenue was generated, while this May’s figure was down by approximately 57%.

As far as the bifurcation is concerned, most of the revenue came from the block subsidy [$888.95 million]. Transaction fee [$80.46 million] and uncle rewards [$41.2 million] chipped in the rest.

Source: The Block

Despite the revenue being low and the Merge approaching, it should be noted that Bitcoin miners only managed to fetch $906.19, making Ethereum miners make 1.08 times more in revenue than them in May.

What about the Ethereum protocol’s revenue?

Alongside the dip in miner revenue, Ethereum’s protocol revenue has also been falling. At the beginning of this year, Ethereum’s revenue used to make up over 80% of the total revenue generated by top dApps and blockchains. Of late, nonetheless, it has only been revolving around 70%.

Again, when compared to other protocols, these diminishing numbers still stand unmatched. The same can be evidenced below.

Source: Token Terminal

So, at this stage, Ethereum it wouldn’t be wrong to infer that the Ethereum protocol and its miners have been able to cope fairly better when compared to their other counterparts.