NVIDIA Ada and AMD RDNA3 will not sell to Ethereum miners. In a dramatic move, the creators of Ethereum have switched over the popular crypto-currency's algorithm from proof-of-work, to proof-of-stake, which means miners will no longer spend GPU resources in competing to find the same blocks. This effectively ends GPU-accelerated mining as Ethereum mining was the number-1 consumer of high-end GPUs through 2021. The switch-over happened as the total terminal difficulty surpassed 58,750,000,000T, with the last block having been found. With this move, global electricity consumption is expected to reduce by 0.2% (that's enough to power the world's top 5 cities).

The impact of this move on GPU sales to crypto-currency miners is expected to be profound. GPUs are no longer an economical way to mine Bitcoin, ASICs are; and Ethereum mining constituted the bulk of activity from GPU-accelerated mining farms. This doesn't mean there aren't other crypto-currencies that rely on GPU-accelerated proof-of-work blockchain compute; but Ethereum had the highest market-cap among such currencies. Gamers have reason to rejoice, as NVIDIA and AMD now have to sell high-end GPUs squarely on merits of gaming performance, power-draw, and graphics card pricing.

The deployment of PoS (Proof of Stake) in Ethereum - called The Merge - has been a target for the development teams for a while now - and yet it still hasn't see the light of day. However, we have been slowly clambering towards it, and the Ethereum team has issued a blog post that places that transition "in the coming months", which likely means a hard PoS fork closer to years' end. Of course, the timeline still gives miners some time make up for hardware investment costs, but perhaps some of them (the smallest ones at least) will start offloading their graphics cards soon so as to enjoy the higher, current second-hand pricing for the latest and greatest GPUs.

The implementation of PoS in Ethereum is expected to reduce power consumption by a ridiculous 95.95% - from a country-sized 44.49 TWh with the current PoW (Proof of Work) technology down to a comparably measly 2.62 megawatt estimate. The Merge should therefore aid Ethereum in not only becoming greener, but also increasing network security, reducing likelihood of 51% attacks, and allowing for further operational scaling of the network. The more skeptical of you will say that miners will just choose another profitable coin to mine, but we have to consider Ethereum's market cap and current valuation - there is currently no other coin that seems to be able to absorb the hashing power currently devoted to Ethereum without crashing its profitability for any and everyone involved. We might be looking at a relatively healthy second-hand graphics card market by the end of the year. Wouldn't that be nice?