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
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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.
Ethereum daily mining revenue in ETH (blue line) against ETH price (gray line) since May 2018.
Ethereum daily mining revenue in ETH (blue line) against ETH price (gray line) since May 2018.

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