Ethereum's mining power has faced another surge and reached a new all-time high as the cryptocurrency market in general faces another wave of selling pressure caused by increased risk-off tendencies on global financial markets.
The continuous increase in the mean hashrate of Ethereum was observed since the summer of 2021 when the Chinese government decided to initiate the crackdown on the mining industry, which caused a rapid drop in mining power on all cryptocurrencies functioning on the PoW protocol.
? #Ethereum $ETH Hash Rate just reached an ATH of 1,137,171,363,556,380
— glassnode alerts (@glassnodealerts) February 20, 2022
Previous ATH of 1,132,434,597,156,380 was observed on 30 January 2022
View metric:https://t.co/tgtxegUqBJ pic.twitter.com/4N2nBTCEMQ
But at the same time, the rapid drop of the hashrate in 2021 helped Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to avoid the selling pressure that was coming from cryptocurrency miners and create a supply deficit on the crypto market.
Ethereum switching to PoS
Previously, Ethereum developers announced the soon-to-come switch of the network to a PoS protocol, which will turn off the mining of the coin completely. Validators will replace miners and will act as the main block exploring power.
Currently, every user on the network can become a validator by sending funds to the Ethereum staking contract. In order to do so, users have to move 32 ETH to the contract that will lock those funds until the user decides to withdraw his or her Ether from the network.
Ether's market performance
At press time, Ethereum is mostly following the general trend on the cryptocurrency market and losing approximately 5% of its previously gained value. The last week also was not a relief for ETH investors as the second-largest cryptocurrency has lost more than 17% of its value in a matter of four days.
Currently, Ethereum is moving at September's price level and has already lost more than 45% from its current all-time high reached back in November 2021.
Vladislav Sopov
Yuri Molchan