Ethereum’s layer 2 witnessed an absolute blast while Bitcoin mining companies are going public left and right. Bitcoin announced v22.0 with a new set of features.

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

Mining industry

Bitcoin

The latest network difficulty was adjusted by an increase of 4.53% to 18.42T. During the last 2-week cycle, the average block time was 9 mins 35 secs.

Revenue peaked at $0.38 per 1 TH/s and was corrected to the current value of $0.33 per 1 TH/s in the period of time between the 2nd of September and 14th of the same month.

According to The Block, some of the largest North American Bitcoin mining companies have collectively mined over 10,500 BTC to date with nearly 40% of the output mined during the past 2 months. The total amount of Bitcoin that these companies held as of August, has quadrupled since December 31.

We’ve also seen several updates regarding companies going public or for fundraising events:

Canada Computational Unlimited has received conditional approval to go public on the Toronto Stock Exchange with the tick “SATO”, Bloomberg reports.

Greenidge, a Bitcoin mining company, and the NASDAQ-listed Support.com had arranged a merger, which resulted in Greenidge going public. More information can be found here.

Argo, the bitcoin mining company, secured yet another loan agreement from Galaxy Digital LP with the mining company’s Bitcoin as collateral. The loan will help Argo to further support its expansion efforts in Texas. More on this article.

Ethereum

The highest average hashrate of 715 GH/s was recorded on Sunday, September 12, 2021, according to Etherescan. Also, on the same day, an all-time high average network difficulty was recorded, according to etherchain. Network difficulty reached 9.566T.

The high demand on the network, and high priority fees associated with minting NFTs, means miner’s revenue was up as seen on the chart. Ever since the London hard fork, Ethereum mining stays lucrative and more miners are coming online.

Dev and network

Bitcoin

Bitcoin Core v22.0 released. This is the first main update with Bitcoin core’s new naming convention on its release. Some notable changes include full hardware support in GUI, I2P and Taproot support. Check this article for more details.

Also, BIP-119 is getting more support among the BTC community. You can now track supporters through the signaling page here.

Ethereum

The Ethereum community witnessed an unprecedented layer2 solutions craze:

Arbitrum, layer 2 solution for Ethereum, has reached 112,714 unique address hits. As of September 15, Arbitrum has a 73.56% market share with more than 2.5 billion USD total value locked (TVL).

Optimism doubled the throughput limit on the mainnet. They reached the 200K transactions per day mark.

Layer 2 scaling solutions designed to counteract network congestion on Ethereum are booming, with over $3.4 billion locked up in scaling protocols, according to layer 2 ecosystem tracker L2Beat.

News on Ethereum network inflation rates:

Ethereum marked its first deflationary day on September 4, and had its first full day of negative issuance due to the EIP-1559 burn surpassing the newly issued coins. The overall net change for the registered day was -352.8717 ETH. Since then, the deflationary tokenomics has been upheld, and the same phenomena occurred on Sept 8 (-658.9628 ETH) and on Sept 9 (-727.3555 ETH).

As of September 15, about 295,788 ETH has been burnt, with a rate of 5.04 ETH/min.

Litecoin

Litecoin Foundation announced the release of OmniLite. OmniLite is a decentralized platform to create tokens and assets via the Litecoin blockchain.

Monero

Monero announced GUI v0.17.2.3 “Oxygen Orion” release. The new release includes privacy, stability, accessibility, and user experience updates as well as optimizations for hardware (Trezor & Ledger) wallets.

Xaya

Xaya introduces Xaya X - a new interface layer that opens up Xaya’s cutting edge technology to allow fully complex decentralized game worlds to run on Polygon. For more, check this article.

Application and adoption

Bitcoin

Bitcoin adoption in Africa grows by 1200% in one year, Bitcoinmagazine reports. Growth is stimulated mostly by retail investors who prefer Bitcoin for savings, payments, transfers, and peer-to-peer trading.

Ethereum

Christie’s auction house announced the sale of Art Blocks Curated: Sets 1-3. Bidding for this lot will be conducted live in ETH.

Beam

Beam released the mobile wallet v6.1 for open testing. New wallet introduces Confidential Asset support, some custom configs, and a bunch of performance enhancements and bug fixes.

Digibyte

Digibyte released the Android wallet v3.0.3.8 for open testing. To download and participate in testing yourself, get the wallet through this link. The iOS version of the wallet v2.0.2 is available for testing in TestFlight here.

Ycash

Ycash released the iOS version of their wallet, YWallet, to open beta. Ycash Foundation encourages its community to test the wallet and report any bugs and errors.

Community

Ethereum

Gitcoin Grants Round 11 kicked off on September 8. As of now, there are more than 67300 contributions from over 4000 people which amassed to 408,996USD with 969 grants contributed towards.

ETHOnline is going to happen from September 17 to October 15. It’s hosted by ETHGlobal as one of the biggest events in the Ethereum community. It consists of a global hackathon and summit series. Now you can browse the agenda and set reminders about the YouTube live streams here.

Litecoin

Litecoin presents an August recap update. The report includes updates on Core 0.21 release, Quarkslab MW audit, and other news.

Nervos

Nervos presents an August community update. The report includes news on the Yokai partnership, upcoming Hackathon, and other related news.

Conflux

Conflux presents an August report, wrapping up all the news and changes that happened last month. The report includes news on the latest hackathon and new listings.

---

PoW Round-Up is our bi-weekly report on the major news and mining insights in and around the Proof of Work ecosystem. Monitor and help secure the PoW world with f2pool.