I can’t figure this out so I’ll leave this here for others to review

I posted earlier asking for a second opinion and the opinion I got was post it here and let everyone else look.

So I’ve noticed Ethermine is paying significantly less than it used to versus other pools. It used to always be #1 or #2 with other pools far behind. Now it’s at 1.96 per 10GH/s for the past week versus F2 at 2.07, Flex at 2.05, 2Miners at 1.94, Hive at 1.9 and Nano at 1.85. Ethermine finds so many blocks it’s luck is always around 100% so it should be at 2.04 or higher not down below 2. It’s hanging out below 2 with the EDEN pools which is a bad sign.

I began looking into why and found a large mev income discrepancy. Ethermine recently advertised its dropping its MEV fee from 20% to 1%. So I checked into its current MEV income to see if there’s something shady there.

I found that Ethermine has made 258.4 ETH in the past 7 days from MEV on etherscan with its biggest payment being 18.9 ETH. In comparison Flex has made 128.8 with its biggest payment being 9.7 ETH. Now Ethermine has made double but it’s found 8x more blocks. This means that Ethermine is making 25% as much MEV income as it should.

Based on this it seems like there’s something wrong here. Is Ethermine secretly siphoning off MEV income or just doing it incompetently?

It appears as if they have a way of funneling money to enrich themselves that isn’t EDEN and I’d encourage people to investigate because I haven’t been able to figure out exactly how. My suspicion is that they are running their own MEV bots and giving their own bots a large discount so that they don’t have to pay their own miners the ETH they’d usually get.

Needless to say Ethermine is paying much lower than the top pools when it used to be at the top and there’s a reason for this. It’s pretty sad that a pool that’s advertising that it will handle others ETH after the merge is openly stealing (or just plain incompetent) and expects people to suddenly trust it with 32 ETH after mining ends.