Ethereum Classic Plummets 23% Over Post-Merge Week

By Jason Nelson

As the crypto bear market continues to pull the price of digital assets lower, Ethereum Classic and Ravencoin, both potential post-merge havens for proof-of-work miners, are seeing double-digit losses.

The price of Ethereum Classic has fallen 23.4% in the week following the merge. The proof-of-work hardfork of the now proof-of-stake Ethereum saw the price of its coin drop from $38.93 on September 15, 2022, the day of the merge, to $29.39 today, according to data from CoinGecko.

Ethereum Classic's hashrate spiked to 223.32 TH per second the day of the merge, up from 58.12 TH the day before. Since then, the hashrate has fallen to 160.32 TH per second, according to mining data site CoinWarz.

Hashrate refers to the total combined computational power used to mine and process blockchain transactions. Terahashes per second (Th/s) is equivalent to 1 trillion hashes per second.

Other proof-of-work blockchains like Ravencoin have shown a similar dynamic as Ethereum Classic. Ravencoin's price fell 43.1% since the merge from $0.06 on September 15, 2022, to $0.03 today, according to CoinGecko.

Unlike Ethereum Classic, which showed a steady rise in hashrate, Ravencoin's hashrate showed a more fickle mining pool. On the day of the merge, Ravencoin's hashrate spiked from 9.64 TH to 19.57 TH before falling to 11.22 TH. Ravencoin's hashrate continued to fluctuate over the next week, at one point going as high as 23.50 TH today before falling again to 7.34 TH.

As the Ethereum merge approached that would see the top blockchain for NFTs, DAOs, and dapps switch from the energy-intensive proof-of-work consensus algorithm to a more environmentally friendly proof-of-stake, miners began searching for Ethereum-compatible proof-of-work blockchains like Ethereum Classic, Ravencoin, and the recently launched Ethereum PoW to continue their once-lucrative mining businesses.

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