At first glance, you might think that Bitcoin miners have had an overall rewarding year. However, a new weekly update report by Arcane Research claims that another set of miners enjoyed a more profitable year.
The little miner who could
Despite complaints about high gas costs, ether miners in 2021 earned more than $ 3 billion more than their Bitcoin counterparts. The Arcane Research report found,
“Ether miners have earned $17 billion in 2021, while the Bitcoin miners have earned $13.6 billion.”
The question we can ask ourselves: what does it look like on a daily basis? Well, while Bitcoin miners enjoyed an average daily revenue of $45 million, Ether miners scooped up $56 million. The report also noted that Ether mining volatility was more than that of Bitcoin. Additionally, Arcane Research indicated that Ethereum’s “unusually high transaction fees” were the reason for the Ether miners’ gain.
Furthermore, the report revealed,
“Luckily for the ether miners, activity on Ethereum has been high the whole year and has increased lately, causing their revenues to skyrocket. Transaction fees on the Bitcoin network have stayed abnormally low since the middle of the summer. Because of this, fees only consist around 1% of Bitcoin mining revenues now, compared to 53% for ether miners.”
Consider Ethereum
Much hope is for the second largest crypto by market cap, even as the underlying altcoins scramble to be the next ‘Ethereum killer’.
For example, Messari researcher Ryan Watkins claimed, Ethereum was the “center of the crypto economy.”
In addition, Ethereum is also getting energetic in the DeFi space, with a more than 1000% increase in total locked-in value and a significant increase in total DEX volumes, stable coin issuance, Bitcoin on Ethereum and sales. OpenSea.
That said, Ethereum has been seeing more Ether burned than mined for around seven consecutive days. To balance this out, gas prices need to cross 150 gwei.
An analyst’s opinion
During the Cryptographic conversation Podcast, Glassnode’s chief analyst, “Checkmate,” was asked to comment on the Ethereum issue. He said,
“They try to do too many things at once…Unfortunately they’ve put stakeholders – people who already own the coin – and network users at odds. I think they’ve bit off more than they can chew and I think it’s going to come back to bite them.”
