Bryan Kinard 
Ethermine has the largest Ethereum mining pool and it has opened a new business front. The new model gives members of the pool an opportunity to stake their Ethereum together and get an interest rate of up to 4.43% on their deposited Ethereum per annum. Entering into the new scheme requires as low as 0.1 ETH.
Paving Way for the Future
As the expected Ethereum Merge, scheduled for the 15th of September, gets closer to us, Ethermine decides to bring a new service to its users and prospective users. It should, however, be noted that the new staking pool service is not yet available to miners in the United States.
Members of the Ethermine network are now able to come together as a collective unit to stake their Ethereum for considerable interests. Users with 0.1 ETH, approximately $159 as of the time of this writing, can be part of the service. Nevertheless, the smaller a user’s holdings are, the higher the fee they pay.
As of the time of this publication, about 393 ETH, amounting to $626,000, have been put into the new project.
Such staking pools as Ethermine have great importance since they give competitive interests, as well as low entry barriers. Some other staking platforms require a minimum of 32 ETH just to be a node operator. But being a node operator on Ethermine earns the operator up to 4.6% in annual interest despite the low requirement to enter.
Moving to provide staking services is an important move for Ethermine. It is, at present, a pool that mines many cryptocurrencies as miners can mine Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Zcash, Ravencoin, Beam, and Ergo.
More Efficient but Concerning
Ethereum mining will be done away with after the Merge has been concluded. The Ethereum network will, thus, be completely moved to the proof-of-stake protocol.
There are currently 222,657 miners on the Ethermine system and they have a total hash rate of about 261.1 TH/s. Ethermine will only continue with PoW mining for Ravecoin, Ethereum Classic, Beam, and Ergo after the Merge.
It is said that a countdown timer will appear on miners’ boards that will countdown to the Merge. Minerscan will continue mining Ethereum till the clock gets to 0.
Ethereum miners will, therefore, be replaced with proof-of-stake validators. It is expected that the Merge will reduce the Ethereum network’s power usage by up to 99%.
Note that some miners in the Ethereum community are working on a hard fork to keep a parallel Ethereum running on the proof-of-work protocol. The protocol shift will, otherwise, render their expensive mining rigs useless.
