Ethereum miners made a record profit and surpassed bitcoin miners again in May. According to Coin Metrics, their monthly earnings amounted to $ 2.35 billion versus $ 1.45 billion from Bitcoin. Last time, Ethereum miners managed to get ahead with a slight advantage in February: $ 1.37 billion and $ 1.36 billion, respectively. More often, the first cryptocurrency prevails over the second in terms of mining income. Ethereum miners’ revenues have grown by 42.4% compared to April.
The widening gap in May was facilitated by the different behavior of BTC and ETH in the market. BTC remained below the absolute highs for several months, until it dropped even lower, while ETH managed to rise to record levels above $ 4,100 during this time. In addition, the Ethereum network again experienced increased loads, which led to a sharp increase in fees. ETH miners earned more than $ 1 billion in commissions in a month, while Bitcoin’s value was $ 130 million.
The desire of users to carry out transactions on the Ethereum network, even in conditions of higher fees, is understandable. May also turned out to be a record month in terms of revenue in the protocols of decentralized finance (DeFi) on the Ethereum blockchain – it amounted to $ 371.6 million, of which $ 153.9 million (41.4%) fell on the Uniswap decentralized exchange, 20.3% – on SushiSwap and 16.6% on Aave. Most of DeFi’s revenue came from liquidity providers. The volume of transactions on the Ethereum blockchain reached $ 666 billion in May, an increase of 92.7% over the previous month.
In the near future, Ethereum miners will find it more difficult to compete with their colleagues from the Bitcoin network. A hard fork of London is being prepared for activation, which includes a proposal to improve Ethereum EIP-1559. This update will lead to the fact that most of the fees that go to miners today will be burned by the protocol. In the longer term, Ethereum will switch to the Proof-of-Stake consensus protocol, where mining will not be used at all, but staking will replace it.
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