Ether’s price surged last year, making it the best-performing cryptocurrency by a wide margin against Bitcoin. As Ethereum’s popularity has grown, so has the value of its cryptocurrency, making mining on its network increasingly attractive. This seems to have led to more miners joining the network, which raised the total hash rate of the network.
As of Thursday, data from Glassnodes shows that Ethereum‘s hash rate has reached a new peak, nearing record levels of 1.11 PH/s. The previous ATH was reached on Jan. 13, when the ETH price plummeted from $4,460 to $3,160.
If the hash rate goes up, it means that more nodes are being added to the network, which makes it less centralized. As a result, such an increase helps to cement blockchain security. Hash rates that are excessively low, on the other hand, could be damaging to the network because fewer nodes would mean slower transactions and less security.
After the Arrow Glacier upgrade was put in place, the move to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus on the Ethereum network was put off until December 2021. It also indicates that Ethereum mining has a long way to go before it comes to an end. A move from the proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm to the PoS algorithm is required before achieving ETH2, which is known as “The Merge.” At that moment, the difficulty bomb will go off, basically shutting off ETH mining and placing the network into an “ice age” that lasts until the switch is completed.
After the switch to PoS, however, ETH won’t be mined anymore. Instead, transactions will be verified by staking on certain nodes.
The network’s hash rate recently passed the one petahash threshold. The amount is equivalent to about 1,000 TH/s and indicates that the network’s hash rate has climbed more than 66,000% since March 2016, when it started being logged on the network.
As reported by Cointelegraph, the Ethereum Foundation questioned the branding of Eth2, claiming it did not appropriately reflect what was going on with the network during its round of updates. The post suggests that the moniker “ETH2” and the language used to differentiate between PoS and PoW chains may be retired in the near future.
This change was made for a number of reasons, such as to keep new users from being tricked, make the site easier to use, lower the barriers to entry, and make the stakes clearer. In the second or third quarter of 2018, the network will make the transition from a PoW to a PoS consensus method.
