Vitalik Buterin surprised by the behavior of miners

The co-founder of the Ethereum cryptocurrency said he was surprised by the behavior of miners who did not leave the Ethereum (ETH) network in the run-up to the Merger.

There were many myths and unsubstantiated assumptions surrounding the upgrade procedure. One of them was a flurry of pressure from active miners who might have tried to leave the network ahead of the PoW (Proof-of-Work) algorithm completion time. However, they behaved loyally.

The creator of Ethereum did not hide his own joy and assured: the network’s hash rate did not disappear before the merger, but only fell by 15%. Buterin feared that the figure would drop by 50%, but at the same time he expected at least a 5% or 10% drop in mining capacity. Experts stressed that the slight change in this parameter is understandable.

In cases where the hash rate in the blockchain drops rapidly, the difficulty of mining increases. Even if it now takes a long time to find a new block, miners will receive most of the reward. This should make their mining operations more profitable until the last block of the old version of the network is generated. Apparently, everyone wanted to earn more, so they did not interrupt their activities.

An interesting situation was observed on the derivatives market. Financing rates for Ethereum futures reached a record low level a few hours before the Merger. This reflected the current imbalance in the perpetual futures markets, as most participants were actively shorting ETH.

However, the sharp rise in the number of short orders was not a sign of an impending price collapse, according to analysts. They assured that it was the result of hedging existing spot positions by institutional and large retail investors.