The profitability of Ethereum cryptocurrency mining has halved in a week

The profitability of Ethereum cryptocurrency mining has halved in a week

There’s good news and bad news for gamers this week as the price of Ethereum has plunged, sending the profitability of the cryptocurrency favoured by GPU miners sharply down. The bad news is that even with a significant reduction in value, Ethereum remains a highly profitable crypto to hold onto and continue to mine.

The value of Ether, the actual currency of the Ethereum blockchain, is creeping back up and over $1,600 USD at the time of writing, a little bounce from a plunge under $1,400, and still down on February highs of over $2,000—a recent peak in the crypto’s value.

Ether price in USD vs. Ethereum mining profitability (Image credit: BitInfoCharts)

The value of Ether is likely to change considerably over the course of the next few hours, weeks, months, however—you really never know with most cryptocurrencies where they’re going to be in a week’s time, and they remain as volatile an investment as ever.

That plunge has seemingly had a larger impact on the profitability of the coin, however. More so than its value, too. That could be due to an increase in difficulty, an artificial limit on hash generation tied to the current overall hashrate of active miners.

The profitability of Ethereum mining, while on the rise slightly, has halved between February 23 and March 3 (via BitInfoCharts ).

Although even while shaving of all that value in just a few days, there’s still money to be made. And just like the value of Ether, profitability is gradually on the rise once more.

We’ve no idea where Ether will end up by 2022, but for now, it’s still profitable enough to keep GPUs in high demand.

The ongoing surge in cryptocurrency pricing has seen a resurgence of GPU mining activity in 2021, which has further exacerbated a shortage of graphics cards.

SushiSwap, Fleeing Ethereum Fees, Is Now Live on Binance Smart Chain, Fantom, Others

Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) – As the leader of crypto exchange Kraken, Jesse Powell is bound to be bullish on Bitcoin. Yet he’s projecting a disruptive future that would stretch the imagination of even the most ardent crypto fans.In a Bloomberg Television interview, Powell said Bitcoin could reach $1 million in the next decade, adding that supporters say it could eventually replace all of the major fiat currencies.“We can only speculate, but when you measure it in terms of dollars, you have to think it’s going to infinity,” he said. “The true believers will tell you that it’s going all the way to the moon, to Mars and eventually, will be the world’s currency.”The CEO also said San Francisco-based Kraken is considering going public, possibly next year.Extreme predictions are nothing new in the world of Bitcoin, where adherents stand to profit from convincing a wider audience that crypto is a legitimate asset class, rather than a speculative fad. The dollar remains the world’s reserve currency and is the benchmark for global trade, though its value has softened in the past year.Powell said Bitcoin bulls see it one day exceeding the combined market cap of the dollar, euro and other currencies.The dollar “is only 50 years old and it’s already showing extreme signs of weakness, and I think people will start measuring the price of things in terms of Bitcoin,” he said.The digital currency slipped 3% in early U.S. trading on Thursday, hovering around $49,000. Prices have surged almost 600% since the start of 2020 on the back of wider mainstream adoption, with bulls seeing it as both an inflation hedge and speculative asset.Critics argue that Bitcoin is in a giant, stimulus-fueled bubble destined to burst like the 2017 boom and bust cycle.Kraken benefits from higher prices as it reaps fees from increased trading. Bloomberg reported last month that the exchange was in talks to raise new funding, which would double the company’s valuation to more than $10 billion.“Personally, I think $10 billion is a low valuation,” Powell said. “I wouldn’t be interested in selling shares at that price.”The CEO did acknowledge the potential for wild market swings, saying prices can “move up or down 50% on any given day.” That kind of volatility has long been one of the negatives of Bitcoin, relegating the market to one of speculation, rather than a means of doing business.“If you are buying into Bitcoin out of speculation, you should be committed to holding for five years,” Powell said. “You have to have strong convictions to hold.”For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

Amazon Managed Blockchain at Last Supports Ethereum, Ending a Two-Year Tease

Amazon Web Services (AWS) “managed blockchain” service now supports Ethereum out of the box, some two years after the integration was first hinted at in 2018.

“With this launch, AWS customers can easily provision Ethereum nodes in minutes and connect to the public Ethereum main network and test networks such as Rinkeby and Ropsten,” AWS said in a blog post Tuesday.

Amazon Managed Blockchain also supports Hyperledger Fabric, a permissioned blockchain network intended for enterprise applications.

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AWS previewed Ethereum support in December.

Read more: Amazon Plays Its Own Game With Enterprise Blockchain

“With Amazon Managed Blockchain, customers get secure networking, encryption at rest and transport, secure access to the network via standard open-source Ethereum APIs, fast and reliable syncs to the Ethereum blockchain, and durable elastic storage for ledger data,” the blog posts add.

There are over 8,300 Ethereum nodes currently on the Ethereum network, according to Etherscan. Nodes keep consensus on the ledger, check transactions, and protect the network against hostile actors. A higher number of geographically and systematically separate nodes is generally considered healthy for the network.

“It’s an incredible signal for the value of Ethereum in modern applications to have a big player like AWS get serious about tooling,” Infura head of product Mike Godsey said a message to CoinDesk after publication. “This will inevitably expand the developer base using this technology and that is great for the whole ecosystem.”