ETH Mining Reward Hits All-Time Low, Reveals Data

By Swati Kishore

Data for February 11, 2019, from Etherscan reveals that the daily mining rewards for Ethereum have plummeted to the lowest ever recorded levels.

At the time of writing the news, Ethereum is the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

Despite trumping Ripple to reclaim the second position, Ethereum has been recently experiencing its lowest levels of new coin minting.

As compared to the new coin creation of 20,000 ETH per day in December 2018, only 13,370 coins were minted on February 10, 2019.

The maximum number of ETH mined in a day was accounted at 39K on July 30, 2015.

The increased drop in the number of ETH mined can be answered by the surging Ethereum mining difficulty.

Major Ethereum developers had conducted a meeting in August 2018 and concluded that the increase in mining difficulty for ETH should be delayed until the release of the Constantinople Hard Fork.

The ‘Difficulty Bomb’ aims to increase the PoW mining that is needed for the obtainment of mining reward. Hence, eventually, the amount of Ethereum supplied into circulation every day is reduced.

The difficulty in mining that is slated to accompany the Constantinople hard fork will require more computing power.

The move is being undertaken by the Ethereum developers in order to ease ETH’s inflation and also to prevent miners from minting ETH through the traditional method since the Ethereum Blockchain will transition to the Proof of Stake algorithm.

The PoS consensus model rewards the miners for staking their coins on Ethereum’s Blockchain. Hence, the reward is paid in accordance with the number of coins that are staked by the miner.

Ethereum developers have decided to encourage miners to stake their coins through the deployment of ‘thirdening’ with the upcoming hard fork. The ‘thirdening’ will decrease the Ethereum mining rewards per Block from 3 ETH to only 2.

Any further delay in the hard fork is slated to benefit the current miners the most because it will also result in a delay in the increase in Ethereum mining difficulty. Hence, ETH miners will be able to make good profits.