Daily Profitability for Ethereum Miners Hits Over 2-Year High

The surge in profitability comes after rises in transaction fees and prices of the ether cryptocurrency.

AccessTimeIconAug 13, 2020 at 10:20 a.m. UTC
Updated Sep 14, 2021 at 9:43 a.m. UTC

With Ethereum transaction fees soaring, the daily profit that can be achieved by miners on the network is now at its highest point in 27 months.

  • Data from BitInfoCharts shows the daily profitability for Ethereum miner operators is at $5.8 per 100 megahashes second (MH/s) of computing power – a level not seen since early May 2018.
  • The increasing profitability is a result of the recent price rise of the ether (ETH) cryptocurrency and a surge in transaction fees brought on by increasing levels of decentralized finance (DeFi) activities on Ethereum.
  • As a result, most of Ethereum mining equipment is now able to operate with a profit margin above 90% even at an electricity cost of $0.05 per kilowatt-hour.
  • Some more state-of-art equipment can mine with a profit margin of as high as 97%, according to data tracked by mining pool F2Pool.
  • In July alone, the profitability metric soared by over 60%, as reported by CoinDesk.
  • At the time, ETH was changing hands at around $320 and daily mining profitability was about $3.27 per 100 MH/s.
  • In the past two weeks, ETH prices have been closer to $400 per token.
  • It's worth noting that data from Glassnode shows that the total daily revenue for Ethereum miners in dollar terms have not yet exceeded the level seen in May 2018.
  • However, the total hash rate securing Ethereum on average is now around 200 petahashes per second (PH/s), while it was over 270 PH/s more than 2 years ago, network data shows.
  • That means mining is now less competitive and the achievable profitability per 1 megahash power is higher, even though total mining revenue is not.
CoinDesk - Unknown
Ethereum daily mining revenue in ETH (blue line) against ETH price (gray line) since May 2018.

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