Miners began shifting their rigs to other blockchains following Ethereum’s successful merge.
2miners reports that Ethereum Classic hash rate has jump nearly 300% in the last 24 hours
According to data from 2miners, Ethereum Classic (ETC), a hard fork of Ethereum implemented following the 2016 DAO hack, saw its network hash jump nearly 300% from 66.54 terra hashes per second (TH/s) last night to 265.43 TH/s today.
The massive increase in hash rate is most likely due to the Ethereum merge earlier today. Following the merge, Ethereum no longer supports the energy-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm and the mining hardware that enables it.
That same mining hardware, however, continues to support Ethereum Classic’s Ethash mining algorithm, which may explain why the forked network’s hash rate has recently skyrocketed.
The hash rate measures the total computational power used to mine and process transactions on a blockchain network. The greater the hash rate, the more decentralized and secure the network.
For example, in August 2020, a shallow hash rate of 2.9 TH/s resulted in a 51% attack on Ethereum Classic. However, the hash rate has increased by a whopping 9,052%, making the network more secure than ever.
According to CoinMarketCap, ETC, the native coin behind Ethereum Classic, is up 2.81% in the last 24 hours and currently trades at $38.18. The total trading volume of ETC across all exchanges has increased by 85.47% in the last 24 hours.
Ethereum Classic is not the only one experiencing an increase in hash rate. Other PoW-based blockchains, such as Ravencoin and Ergo, increased hash rates following the merge.
According to data from 2miners, the Ravencoin blockchain’s hash rate has doubled in the last 24 hours, from 8.29 TH/s to 18.47 THs using the X16R mining algorithm. Ergo (ERG), another PoW blockchain that supports GPU mining, has seen its hash rate increase by more than 372% in the last 24 hours, from 29.05 TH/s to 157.56 TH/s.
ERG, Ergo’s native coin, is also up 14.51% to $4.93 in the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap data. Based on when each of these hash rates began to rise, the latest Ethereum upgrade is most likely fueling further miner emigration.
