[PoW Round-Up] Bitcoin dev posting new proposal, Ethereum to merge on Ropsten testnet

A draft BIP for package relay is shared, while Ethereum tests The Merge to reach a new milestone.

Learn about industry news, development updates, community happenings, and other aspects of the PoW world!

Mining industry

• Bitcoin

The Bitcoin network saw a change of -4.33% in the hashrate on 2022–05–25, the biggest negative percentage change in the recent 10 months. As the price fluctuates to around $30,000, the past 2-week cycle was recorded with the mining revenues of $0.12 per 1 TH/s.

More ASICs approach their breakeven prices. At the time of writing, miners with unit power of 60W/T could barely generate profits since the electricity cost rate was around 95%, and the cost rate for miners with a unit power above 65 W/T was more than 100%. This means that their electricity costs had exceeded the revenues that could be brought by the miners at the power rate of $0.08 per kWh. You may learn more details about this topic on f2pool’s Popular Miners page.

• Ethereum

The Ethereum network has experienced a drop in hashrate, from its ATH of 1126 TH/s to the recent 1064 TH/s. The unit revenue also fell down from a level around $0.3 to $0.24 per 1 MH/s. The fall was expected to be affected by the market downturn and the difficulty bomb, which gradually slowed down the block production.

Dev and network

• Bitcoin

Gloria Zhao posted a draft BIP for package relay, a feature to effectively make the CPFP fee bump below the minimum feerate being accepted by the nodes. Learn more about this feature in the following podcast.

Woltx created a tutorial on making silent payments on Signet. Silent payments is a feature adding privacy to Bitcoin.

• Ethereum

On 2022–05–19, mainnet-shadow-fork-5 has been completed and it went exceedingly well.

On 2022–06–08, the merge on Ropsten, an Ethereum public testnet, is expected to happen as an important step forward towards The Merge.

Discussions related to the shadow fork and the merge will be continued in the upcoming Core Devs Meetings scheduled on 2022–05–27. Please stay tuned.

• Litecoin

The Litecoin MimbleWimble has finally been activated on 2022–05–19. This brought not only higher community engagement, but also an hashrate increase of around 500 TH/s on the activation day.

• Decred

Decrediton v1.7.3 has been released, addressing a couple of issues.

Application and adoption

• Ethereum

GameStop released its Ethereum wallet. This non-custodial wallet has direct Ethereum L2 integration, allowing users to make cheaper and faster transactions.

MataMask partners with Asset Reality to give victims of cryptocurrency scams a chance to recover their stolen funds. Asset Reality will be the case handler, building an investigation into each scam operation. This greatly increases the chances of fund recovery, bringing justice to the victims of cryptocurrency scams.

• Horizen

TokenMint has launched its Phase 2 with Token Generator on testnet.

• Xaya

Xaya Names is now mintable on Polygon for use cases, such as ERC721 tokens, primarily for in-game usernames and decentralized IDs. Learn more here.

Community and more

• Bitcoin

On Wednesday, Portugal’s congress rejected two bills that sought to tax Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Read more here.

The community celebrates the 12th Bitcoin Pizza day. Bitcoin has been proven as sound money and has been gaining value over time since its first use for purchasing goods in 2010.

Central bankers gathered in El Salvador to talk about Bitcoin adoption. Financial representatives of 44 countries visited El Salvador and saw how the country’s Bitcoin adoption is changing the place for the better. Review this event by reading this post.

• Ethereum

The Merge Community Call #4 is going to happen on 2022–06–03. Issues being covered will include the Ropsten Merge, the impacts on the applications after the merge, and more.

ETHPrague will be held from 2022–06–10 to 2022–06–12, with a conference and a hackathon.

• Dogecoin

The first NFT minted on Dogecoin was sold at the price of 100,420.69 DOGE.

• Decred

The April edition of the Decred Journal is out now, covering DCRDEX improvements and the activation of the 4 consensus changes.

• Nervos

Nervos introduces Wallet Guard, a grant recipient part of Build Club, to be their new ecosystem partner.

• Hathor

Hathor released its Q1/2022 report, summarizing all the developments led by Hathor Labs on Hathor Network.

The PoW Round-Up is our bi-weekly report on the major news and mining insights in and around the Proof of Work ecosystem.

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