Minority Mining Pools Could Collude Against New Ethereum Upgrade

Minority mining pools or a small group of ETH miners are trying to pick off bigger mining pools’ subscribers to try and fight off the effects of the EIP 1559 ETH upgrade as we are reading more in today’s Ethereum news.

Ethereum miners formed a cartel of sorts to divert the implementation of the proposal as they believe it cuts into their bottom line quite unfairly. About 8 minority mining pools amounting to 30% of the network’s hash power showed their support behind Flexpool’s stance against the Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1559.
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The small pool that has only mined 10 blocks back in December is now calling on ETH miners to abandon ship from major mining pools that support the update like Sparkpool and F2Pool. Flexpool’s blog post read:

“Don’t be a slave to your mining pool. Blacklist pools that support robbing their miners just so that they can inflate the price of [ETH] for rich speculators.”

Since the blog post was published a few days ago, about 400 miners joined Flexpool as CEO Alexander Sadovsky said. It’s quite understandable why ETH miners will want EIP 1559 to not be implemented or delayed as miners have been winning from the uptick in on-chain activity sparked by the emergence of the DeFi space. The mining profitability is reaching a three-year high as the congestion pushed transaction fees to record highs in 2020. Companies like Linzhi started rolling out new ASIC ETH miners developed over the past few years. The simple protocol change is going to force the miners towards lesser-known ETHash coins which is a potential waste of money.

Time will tell if the bigger mining pools are going to react to the collusion campaign that is sparked by Flexpool and the three biggest mining pools like F2Pool and Bitfly are anti-EIP 1550 or neutral. BitFly has been against the proposal and reaffirmed its stance saying that the EIP could put Ethereum’s future at risk.

It seems as if the dominant ETH mining pool SparkPool is walking back to the prior stance on EIP as the CEO Xin Xu said that a “better fee model design is needed” and that the pool is quite supportive of the proposal for a long-time. Changpeng Zhao on the other hand said that no SparkPool employee had given a public stance on the matter adding:

“Obviously, mining pool (sic) always oppose 1559.”