The daily income earned by Ethereum miners has soared by over 60% in a month, according to data tracked by Ethereum mining pool Sparkpool.
The surge in daily profit from Ethereum mining surge has also outpaced ether‘s (ETH) price jump of 40% over the same period.
The profitability rise comes thanks to soaring transaction fees on the network, as well as relatively slow growth in competition from other miners.
Sparkpool’s data shows Ethereum miners’ daily income was around $1.85 per 100 megahashes second (MH/s) on the network on June 27. Over the past month, and the last two weeks in particular, this has jumped by 60% and reached as high as $3.27 on July 25. The metric has since dropped back to around $3.
During the same period, ether’s price has gone up by nearly 40%, from $229 on June 27 to $327 at time of writing, the highest price point for over a year.
Transaction fees on the network, which form part of a miner’s daily revenue, have reached a two-year high as the hype around decentralized finance (DeFi) brought a spike in network activities.
However, the total computing power competing on the world’s second largest blockchain network by market capitalization has remained steady around 190 petahashes per second, blockchain explorer Etherscan shows.
Read more: DeFi Hype Has Sent Ethereum Fees Soaring to 2-Year High: Coin Metrics
In fact, data from Bitinfocharts indicates daily mining revenue on Ethereum had remained below $2 per 100 MH/s during the first quarter of the year and dropped to $1 per 100 MH/s following the crypto market crash on March 12. But in the four months since, daily mining revenue has tripled.
Currently, some state-of-art Ethereum mining equipment, such as InnoSilicon’s A10 Pro with a computing power of 485 megahashes per second (MH/s), can generate $12.92 in daily revenue at Ethereum’s current price and mining difficulty.
With an electricity of cost of $0.03 per kilowatt-hour (kWh), one A10 Pro machine is able to bring home a daily net profit of nearly $12, according to mining pool F2Pool’s miner profitability tracker.
Profit at that level exceeds some top-of-the-line Bitcoin miners by almost 100%, although bitcoin’s price has jumped above $10,000 over the weekend for the first time since early June. The sudden increase came after weeks of low price volatility that kept the cryptocurrency stuck between $9,000 and $9,500.
However, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty is still around its all-time-high. As such, even the most efficient Bitcoin miners, like MicroBT’s WhatsMiner M30S++ and Bitmain’s AntMiner S19 Pro, are generating a daily revenue of $9 per unit.
At an electricity cost of $0.03 per kWh, that would provide a daily profit of around $6.50 at bitcoin’s current price and difficulty, data from mining pool PoolIn shows. In general, industrial electricity cost for crypto mining can range between $0.03 to $0.06 per kWh.