Ethereum miners earned $168 million in September, killing Bitcoin miners in seconds

Revenues for Ethereum (ETH) miners surged in September, according to on-chain analytics resource glassnode. Although the price of Ethereum did not increase significantly during this period, miners on the Ethereum network also saw their income increase due to high transaction fees.

In September, miners earned 450,089 ETH ($168.7 million), a 39% year-on-year increase, and miners earned about $113 million in August.

Bitcoin and Ethereum - all miners income Source: glassnode

Ethereum fell below $1,400, the largest intraday drop of 15.1%: Jinse Finance reported that market data showed that Ethereum fell below $1,400 and is now quoted at $1,366. Since its next intraday high ($1,579), the biggest drop has reached 15.1% %. [2022/11/9 12:35:21]

The sharp increase in the revenue of Ethereum miners is due to the fact that activity in the decentralized finance sector peaked in September, resulting in multiple price increases in transaction fees.

DeFi is great for liquidity miners and miners

DeFi not only provides a strong use case for Ethereum, but also creates new demand for Ethereum, which can be used to pay gas fees for transactions and smart contracts. All of these factors have driven the price of Ethereum forward in 2020, allowing it to far outperform Bitcoin.

The current number of unconfirmed transactions in Ethereum is 152,478: Etherscan.io data shows that there are 152,478 unconfirmed transactions in Ethereum. The total network computing power of Ethereum is 209.15 TH/s, the current mining difficulty is 2594.93 TH, and the transaction processing capacity is 13.9 TPS. [2020/8/10]

Additionally, a large amount of BTC was flowing into the Ethereum blockchain in the form of WBTC and RenBTC, which further increased the activity of the Ethereum blockchain. To date, the total value of assets tokenized by anchoring BTC alone has reached about $1 billion.

Bitcoin and Ethereum YTD performance Source: Digital Assets Data

ZenGo Research Engineer: Bancor Vulnerabilities Expose Dangerous Conventional Operations in Ethereum DeFi: Jinse Finance reported that ZenGo research engineer Oded Leiba said that the fund withdrawal function of the Bancor smart contract was set so incorrectly that anyone could call it. Compounding this problem, Bancor's contract requires unlimited withdrawal authorization upon first interacting with the protocol. Even if a user only plans to test the protocol with limited funds, the system can withdraw their entire balance for a particular token. And it turns out that many DApps on Ethereum are doing the same, such as Compound, Uniswap, bZX, Aave, Kyber, and dYdX, all with unlimited or extremely large authorizations. According to previous reports, Bancor's new contract had a security breach on June 18, and hackers could easily withdraw all funds from any user who signed a smart contract with the company. [2020/6/24]

As the revenue of Ethereum miners grows, new participants join the network to earn revenue. The hash rate of the Ethereum network has also been growing steadily, surpassing its all-time high on October 7, which is another fundamentally bullish sign for Ethereum as it indicates that more participants are investing in the network .

Recent data also shows that new users are flocking to Ethereum. Widely used in DeFi, Ethereum browser wallet MetaMask hit 1 million users this month as the number of addresses holding ETH continues to rise, but can Ethereum handle the extra load on its network?

DeFi will make or break Ethereum

DeFi is creating attraction for Ethereum and helping a large number of miners to return to the Ethereum network, but it is also worth noting that due to the congestion of the Ethereum network, transaction fees have reached unsustainable levels.

As users compete to seal deals, they must pay higher fees. On Sept. 2, the average fee for a standard transaction on ethereum was $15, according to Blockchair.

While this is good for miners in the short term, it could make regular users abandon DeFi entirely, as using smart contracts is too expensive. In fact, this issue may have been one of the main reasons for the sharp correction in DeFi token prices last month.

Total value locked in DeFi Source: Digital Assets Data

Despite the growing popularity of Ethereum second-layer solutions, most people simply don't use them. Other more permanent solutions, such as the upcoming Ethereum 2.0, appear to be far from ready, which could lead to competitors such as Binance Smart Chain taking action, or even surpassing Ethereum entirely.

Some analysts also believe that the DeFi "boom" may be over because DeFi's popularity has declined and regulatory intervention is imminent.

Still, Ethereum must quickly address its scalability issues if it is to deal with the possible growth of new trends like DeFi and NFTs.

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