Ethermine Unveils New Staking Service as The Merge Nears

With the mining era slowly coming to an end, the world’s largest Ethereum mining pool – Ethermine – has launched a staking pool service for users. To become a validator on the Ethereum network, users must invest 32 ETH. But Ethermine’s new service, dubbed – Ethermine Staking – offers a workaround.

It aims to let members of the pool collectively stake their Ether (ETH) and also earn interest after the transition of Ethereum’s consensus mechanism from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS). The minimum investment amount is 0.1 ETH.

Ethermine’s Ethermine Staking

Ethermine Staking will charge 0% fees until the Merge. It is, however, important to note that the fee will be based on the amount of ETH holding. As such, the smaller the holding, the greater the fee.

The website describes the service as,

“Ethermine Staking is an investment that is based on the Ethereum staking rewards via the ETH.STORE reference rate. This makes it possible to earn interest on your ETH investment as if you were staking without having to own 32 ETH for solo staking.”

According to Ethermine, which is operated by Austrian company Bitfly, the new service will not be available to the miners in the US.

Withdrawals from Etheremine accounts of user deposits of ETH will not be enabled until the Ethereum protocol allows the withdrawal of all staking rewards. The platform expects that this will be made possible in six to twelve months following the Merge. On the other hand, the longest waiting period is estimated to last nearly five years.

As per the latest stats, more than 223,000 active miners are currently involved in the Ethermine Ethereum pool. generating a total hash rate of over 263 TH/s.

Support for Ethereum Forks

Despite initial hesitation, several crypto players are now preparing for possible forks of Ethereum after the Merge that is scheduled for mid-September.

Binance recently announced that it plans to credit users’ accounts with tokens from any forked versions of Ethereum created during the transition. It would continue to use the existing “ETH” ticker to represent the planned PoS version of Ethereum.

Another prominent player in the space, Coinbase, said that it would “evaluate” Ethereum forks that may spawn after the Merge further adding that the asset will be reviewed as any other asset listed on its platform.