Ethereum Mining Costs Reached Long-time Highs
Second-most valuable cryptocurrency Ethereum (ETH) is on the rise, and miners are cashing in big-time. Over 42% of miner revenues is currently derived from fees in 24 hours, the level at their second-highest level to date.
The highest level was achieved in a mid-2018 surge when transaction fees peaked around $0.912. In recent trading, transaction fees hit $0.879.
Most crypto asset prices go up with increasing mining activity with more miners joining the industry. This raises the need for more computing power, electricity, and software, raising fees along with it.
Thanks to increasing value for ETH in recent months, it makes mining potentially profitable in the long term. It’s also beneficial to investors from many other options to make income from the coin, such as faucets and staking.
ETH is still demonstrating a bullish trend over the past three weeks by 65.78%. The crypto’s highs is thanks to an increase in popularity for DeFi projects with interest in new ETH tokens.
Interests from both institutional and retail investors surged significantly that it hit a daily trade volume high of $20 billion. It’s currently trading around $390 levels with a resistance level at $400.
The coin is still trading above the $367 high achieved in 2019. If it can close daily and weekly candles above $440, it could trigger a bullish continuation to $515 and $624.
Ethereum Mining Brings Crypto-led Debate
The crypto news came days after Ethereum and Bitcoin advocates debated on the total value of ETH last week.
On Friday, ETH co-founder Vitalik Buterin said adding a proper total supply is the “low-cost and reasonable thing to do.” Multiple independent developers also agreed that there was an opportunity that came with figuring out this figure.
Contrary to Bitcoin, Ether has a hard way to verify its coin supply. BTC has the gettxtoutsetinfo command to calculate its current total with every node, which ETH doesn’t have. Instead, the coin’s supply is stuck behind independent developers to calculate.
Kraken developer Pierre Rochard also pointed out that ETH’s verification for its native supply isn’t as simple.
As of publishing time, these developers counted a total of 111,562,994. The data exported directly off the ETH blockchain.
Only rough supply chains exist for other assets like gold or dollars. But the supply of cryptocurrencies can be parsed down to the exact unit for modeling or auditing, and others.
ETH Supply on Different Perspectives
Unlike Bitcoin, ETH aims to become a developer platform for decentralized financial applications. Some community members were discarded the question of supply altogether.
In fact, another Ethereum co-founder Jeremy Gardner Tweeted that he doesn’t “give a shit” about the supply. He compared this to gold and asked if people wanted to know its own supply.
But most investors are concerned that this will affect the difficulty of running a full ETH node. Users who run their own nodes can validate transactions on the ETH network along with it. Running an Ether node had led to service providers.
Ethereum 2.0 developers are also trying for self-verification with lightweight clients in Proof-of-Stake (PoS). Other developers also started building scripts to calculate the supply.
