Power consumption and CO2 emissions

The forecast for TW reduction was wrong. The end result was even better!

According to this post that the Ethereum Foundation strongly endorsed, the power consumption of each transaction was supposed to be 0.04 kWh. Instead, each transaction uses about 0.03 kWh, a 25% reduction over the original calculation!

CO2 emissions have also heavily dropped. PoW Ethereum released about 11 million tons of CO2, while PoS Ethereum emits around 870 tons. This is a reduction of 99.992%.

Inflation/deflation

For the first time, Ethereum became deflationary at the Merge. This only lasted a short time, burning about 200 ETH, but it became deflationary again as of last week! The network got busier due to a free mint token called XEN Crypto. And while that was a giant pump and dump, it did contribute to Ethereum becoming deflationary for almost 9 days, reducing PoS issuance from +13,000 ETH to +6,700 ETH since the Merge.

Censorship

Censorship has been a hot topic in the Ethereum and wider crypto community lately, as an OFAC-regulated MEV-relay built (and censored) more than 51% of total blocks.

They claim to have remedied this issue by making Flashbots open-source, which allows developers to fork Flashbots without the OFAC list.

Slashings

Since the Merge, there have been 25 slashings. These were due to 'attestation violations', which means they would run two identical validator keys on two different nodes, leading to the network thinking they are attacking.

This action could be malicious because if they double-sign enough attestations saying “yes, this block is valid” they could be trying to attack Ethereum, which the network obviously doesn't like.

Conclusion:

Ethereum has only had a few bumps since the Merge, mostly related to MEV relays. Flashbots is the main culprit here, censoring almost 42% of all blocks on Ethereum since the Merge.

But overall, Co2E is down, power consumption is down, and Ethereum had a week-long deflationary streak (something that wouldn’t be possible under PoW!).