For August, the aggregate revenue of Bitcoin miners amounted to $684.3 million. The figure rose by 12% compared with the previous month, according to the report ForkLog.
At the same time, the share of fees in revenue fell from 2.02% to 1.41%.
The miners of the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap earned $829 million in the month — up 22% from July. The volume of commission revenues hardly changed, but their share of the overall figure declined by 4%.
Barry Silbert’s Foundry USA, part of Digital Currency Group, continued to lead among Bitcoin pools by share of the hashrate of the network — 20.9%. AntPool is close to his figure (19.3%), with F2Pool in third place.
Total mining power of the Bitcoin network as of September 6 reached 224.5 EH/s. The metric is gradually returning toward the peak reached on June 11 (231 EH/s).
As a result of the rise in Bitcoin’s hash rate, mining difficulty for the first cryptocurrency on August 31 increased by 9.26%. The metric reached its maximum on May 11 at 31.25 TH.
Ahead of The Merge, Ethereum’s hash rate, after May’s highs, stands around 890 TH/s.
Presumably, some miners are gradually switching to Ethereum Classic (ETC) mining, not waiting for Ethereum’s transition to the Proof-of-Stake algorithm. This is indirectly evidenced by the Ethereum fork’s maximum hash-rate readings in early September.
Analysts at JPMorgan have suggested that Ethereum Classic could become the main beneficiary of miner influx after The Merge.
Major pools such as Ethermine and AntPool have offered to switch mining to the Ethereum fork.
The head of ETC Cooperative, the organization backing Ethereum Classic’s development, Bob Summerwill, also urged Ethereum miners to connect to the network.
As noted, supporters of the PoW fork of Ethereum were skeptical about Ethereum Classic’s ability to absorb the freed-up computing power.
Read ForkLog’s Bitcoin news in our Telegram — cryptocurrency news, prices and analysis.