Anticipating Ethereum 2.0 miner balances surge

Ethereum 2.0 is one of the biggest milestones of the Ethereum blockchain. As the ecosystem gears up for the re-engineering the entire ETH blockchain, a new trend was observed within the miners on the network. According to the latest development, miners are now holding on the coin as evidenced by the increase in their balance over the past couple of weeks.

The data from the crypto analytic platform Santiment as tweeted by Trader Ali Martinez revealed that Ethereum miners have collectively increased their balance by 15,000 ETH throughout the past couple of weeks. This happened along with a surge in the number of addresses with 100,000 to 1,00,000 ETH  by roughly 5% since the beginning of June.

Source: Twitter | Santiment

The upcoming network upgrade – ‘Ethereum 2.0’ release is a significant transition for all involved in the ecosystem. While the process would be potentially slow, when it comes to the miners, however, the options are not many. In fact, there are just two – first, shift focus to other altcoins and second being, selling their mining equipment.

After Ethereum becomes a Proof-of-Stake [PoS] blockchain, the network will abandon the Proof-of-Work [PoW] consensus algorithm, meaning the mining devices will become obsolete. Here, unlike ASICs in Bitcoin, ETH miners mostly use GPUs which are way cheaper than the former and are also more accessible. In addition, GPUs are effectively more flexible than ASICs since a user can easily switch to other coins with different algorithms. Hence, a miner can always switch to other altcoins.

The second option is to sell the mining equipment and instead accumulate enough ETH required to be a staker. While any user can stake the token, for the purpose of validating blocks and the subsequent rewards, validators will be based on the proportionate value of the stake. A minimum threshold of 32 ETH is required to participate in staking on Ethereum 2.0.