With the DeFi craze burning hot and creating new all-time highs for Ethereum fees, it’s not just yield farmers who are celebrating. Ethereum network miners earned almost $170 million US dollars worth of ETH in September, dwarfing the earnings of BTC miners who only made $26 million. This record broke the previously set high of August, which amounted to over $113 million, and trivializes the former all-time high set back during the cryptocurrency boom of January 2018. 2020 appears to be a great year as record earnings of 450K ETH for miners is reported.
Despite this, by late September and early October, it appears that the DeFi movement may be taking a break, with reduced activity observed across the network.
Drastically Lower Fees In Early October
With the reduced activity, Ethereum gas fees have seemed to normalize to some extent. Current network fees hover around $0.15 to under a dollar according to GasNow and Ethgasstation, although the average gas use across the last 30 days for most DeFi applications still amounts to over double that.
Some have forecasted this return to normalcy as the start of the end for the hype around DeFi, claiming the entire period to be nothing more than a “bubble” and a temporary increase in network traffic as yields across DeFi applications begin to stabilize.
Is It Still Worth It To Mine Ethereum?
Given the high fees and revenue earned by miners, many have begun looking towards Ethereum mining as a potential side income on top of yield farming. Mining Ethereum requires fairly specialized systems and knowledge. Unlike the early years of cryptocurrency where most mining could be done on everyday computers, today’s miners are often configured to be extremely fast at the proof-of-work mechanisms used in blockchains.
With daily profitability of Ethereum at all-time highs with plenty of demand from DeFi, GPU mining became reasonably profitable in terms of energy usage even with high energy costs.
For consumer-level mining, the drawback would be in the number of GPUs required to make a significant profit as well as the heat management necessary. However, miners have pointed out that if the current profit trend continues, it may be a good time for people to jump in and start mining with cheaper second hand GPUs, with the RTX3080 cards and AMD cards being released.
If you are looking to calculate your potential mining profits, you can check out whattomine.com, a mining calculator to figure out if it is worth it with your current electricity costs. To use, simply key in your GPU model(s), your cost of electricity in KW/H, and click “Calculate” – the calculator will then return an estimate of your revenue and profits if the current state of network fees continue.
For those who want to get started quickly with mining, user-friendly, one-button miners such as Honeyminer may be the fastest way to get started. However, Honeyminer does charge a hefty 8% fee for the first GPU and 2.5% thereafter, which significantly reduces profit.
Ways For Users To Reduce Network Fees
If you are simply looking to make transactions on the Ethereum network and want to optimize your fee usage, you can now use websites like Gasnow to predict network fees and pay the appropriate sum to have your transacted broadcasted. They offer a suggested range of fees based on how fast you require your transaction to be, and give you an idea of how much gas you will be paying in easy to understand USD terms.
Considering that record earnings of 450K ETH for miners was reported this year, you might like to learn more about mining and cryptocurrencies with Oobit. Oobit is a financial service that makes buying and selling digital currencies easy, simple and lets you use crypto with the same ease as traditional money. We connect and introduce what would be an endless maze of information surrounding blockchains, and build tools that enhance the crypto user experience. Find out more at Oobit.com.
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