finbold.com
With the completion of the major upgrade to its software, the Ethereum ($ETH) ecosystem is expected to become a lot greener, as guaranteed by its co-founder Vitalik Buterin and the non-profit Ethereum Foundation.
Indeed, the inventor of Ethereum has stressed the importance of the Merge upgrade, which marks the network’s transition from the Proof-of-Work (PoW) to the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, in a tweet published on September 15.
As Buterin explained:
“The merge will reduce worldwide electricity consumption by 0.2%”
In his tweet, he was directly quoting Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, who made the claim at a live stream of the event.
Decreasing electricity consumption on the network and worldwide
Moreover, the non-profit organization dedicated to supporting Ethereum and related technologies also stated on the Merge webpage, last updated on September 15:
“The Merge reduced Ethereum’s energy consumption by ~99.95%.”
After the Merge, the total energy consumed by Ethereum to secure the network now amounts to nearly 0.01 TWh/yr. Prior to the Merge, the platform used about 112 TWh/yr, according to the organization’s data.
In other words, the entire post-Merge Ethereum network now consumes less energy than gaming or platforms such as Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) or PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL). By comparison, Bitcoin’s PoW mining uses about 200 TW/yr.
Ethereum PoW miners look for alternatives
Meanwhile, the $ETH miners that were left with dwindling options after the upgrade – giving up mining and staking $ETH instead or switching to other chains, are now turning en masse to alternatives such as Ravencoin (RVN), whose hash rate skyrocketed post-Merge.
Expecting the Ethereum price to drop after the Merge, many traders dumped their holdings onto exchanges, resulting in the massive $ETH inflow to these exchanges in the days leading up to the event, as Finbold earlier reported.
At press time, the decentralized finance (DeFi) token traded at $1,593, down 0.02% on the day, as well as 2.63% across the previous seven days.
The market capitalization of the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by this indicator currently stands at $194.77 billion, as per CoinMarketCap data.
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