Miners Sold Nearly 15,000 Ethereum Leading Up to the Merge

By Sujith Somraaj

Ethereum miners have sold over 14,785 ETH, totaling $19.73 million as of today’s price, from September 9 up to the day of the merge, according to data from OKLink. 

OKLink pulls mining data across a dozen different mining pools, including F2Pool, Binance, and BTC.com

On September 12, the miners reduced their holdings by 2,767 ETH, followed by another 4,121 ETH the next day.The largest sale came on September 14, the day before the Ethereum merge. 

Miners at that time offloaded nearly 8,032 Ethereum, contributing to the asset’s drop from $1,636 to $1,471 in less than 24 hours.

Chart indicates the drop in the miner’s ETH balance during the merge. Source: OKLink.

Ethereum’s exchange inflows also hit a high before the merge. On September 14, exchange inflows peaked at 2.4 million ETH, according to data from IntoTheBlock.

High exchange inflows are typically viewed as a bearish event as traders move funds from cold wallets to be sold on the open market. Conversely, high exchange outflows indicate that users move funds off these platforms to their cold wallets for long-term holding.

“ETH reserves of miners have decreased dramatically, up to -22% in the last seven days,” Juan Pellicer, a researcher at IntoTheBlock, told Decrypt.  “It is unclear if these outflows were all sent to exchanges to sell.”

Since the merge on September 15, Ethereum (ETH) has lost over 16% of its value.

As of this writing, ETH changes hands at around $1,368 apiece, according to data from CoinGecko.

What was the Ethereum merge?

Following the merge event, the Ethereum network shifted from an energy-intensive, proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm to a proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism. 

This shift also ended all mining activity on the platform, as so-called validators now secure the network rather than miners. 

These validators stake 32 Ethereum to validate transactions on the network. For performing this service, they can earn a neat yield; if they behave dishonestly, allowing fraudulent transactions to occur, their staked Ethereum can be fined.

Mining outfits with heaps of machines were thus left searching for new networks once Ethereum executed this change. 

It also appears that many of them offboarded a hefty chunk of their ETH holdings when exiting.

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