The Ethereum Foundation blog posted a post about the imminent transition of the blockchain protocol from mining to staking or passive income for depositors. The Ethereum protocol is switching to the proof of stake (PoS) method. The good news for those wishing to participate in the work of the Ethereum network lies in the fact that the energy efficiency of blockchain operations will increase by 99%. At the same time, the usual cryptocurrency mining will die, which will force many to abandon it.
The first few months of operation of the new Beacon Chain as part of the transition to Ethereum 2.0 made it possible to estimate the energy intensity of blockchain operations using the PoS method when various transactions are distributed to randomly selected groups of computers. This is a new tool in the Ethereum 2.0 blockchain called Sharding. The introduction of sharding with the transition to PoS will raise the speed of blockchain transactions from 15 operations per second to 100, 1000, and even up to 100,000 in the future.
According to the Ethereum Foundation, in the coming months, the energy efficiency of the Ethereum blockchain will exceed the energy efficiency of bitcoin mining by 7000 times. And if today the Ethereum network consumes electricity as a small country, then with the transition to PoS, energy consumption for solving similar problems will decrease to just over 2,000 average households.
If we talk about the numbers at the end of March 2021, then the transition from the current PoW method to ubiquitous PoS would reduce the consumption of the Ethereum blockchain network per transaction from 84,000 Wh to 35 Wh (hypothetically), while the operation of the blockchain network on one transaction would spend 1,135,000 Wh. The work of the Ethereum blockchain networks will become more friendly to green initiatives in the world, and the secondary video card market will explode with interesting offers.