Ahead of the Ethereum (ETH) Merge on September 15, the world’s largest Ethereum mining pool, Ethermine, has introduced a new staking pool for customers. Notably, it is unavailable to American miners.
The new service provides Ethermine users with the opportunity to stake their ETH collectively and earn interest on their deposits. Only 0.1 ETH ($159) is required to enter. However, the cost increases as the stake size decreases.Currently, the site offers investors an annual ETH interest rate of 4.43 percent.
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At the time of writing, 393 Ether valued at around $626,000 had been invested in Ethermine’s new pool.
These staking pools are significant because they provide competitive interest rates and lower entry hurdles than solo staking as node operators, which needs a minimum of 32 ETH ($51,000) to operate a node. The annual interest rate for staking on Ethpool as a node operator is 4.6%, while the rate for Ethermine is 0%.
Ethermine presently runs as a multi-currency mining pool, enabling users to mine ETH, ZCASH, Ethereum Classic (ETC), Beam (BEAM), Ravencoin (RVN), and Ergo. The decision to provide staking is somewhat of a shift for the company (ERGO).
After the merge, the network will switch from a proof-of-work (PoW) mining model to a proof-of-stake (PoS) staking model.
There are 222,657 active miners on Ethermine at the time of this writing, resulting in a hash rate of 261,1 tera hashes per second (TH/s). The pool will only continue to support the PoW mining of Ethereum Classic (ETC), Ravencoin (RVN), Ergo (ERGO), and Beam after September 15. (BEAM).
Conclusion of Mining Era
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The Merge countdown clock will be shown on miner dashboards, and miners can continue to mine ETH until the timer reaches zero.
The imminent replacement of ETH miners with POS validators might reduce ETH network use by 99 percent.
But some people in the ETH mining community want the PoW consensus process to stay the same because if it changed, their expensive and powerful mining rigs would become useless.
Other prominent members of the crypto community have also criticised the proposed changes, stating that they would have harmful consequences beyond the loss of mining.
The present PoW method is an energy-intensive procedure in which miners utilise massive quantities of computer power to solve complicated riddles, validate transactions, and receive ETH rewards.
Related: Before Merge, Ethereum devs address node centralization.
Under the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) concept, participants or validators store a predetermined amount of cryptocurrency in a smart contract on the blockchain; their stake contributes to the network’s security and decentralisation.
