Ethereum’s hashrate has risen to new highs, crossing one petahash per second (PH/s) for the first time as pictured above.
That suggests network demand for eth has also risen and risen amidst the invention of defi and NFTs which are gaining popularity in Asia.
But comparatively, eth is now where bitcoin was in 2017 as that’s when BTC crossed one petahash for the first time ever.
Price-wise eth is also around those bitcoin 2017 price levels, indicating there might be some sort of law of adoption or awareness as eth and bitcoin follow an almost identical path.
So far, because this summer eth is set to remove Proof of Work (PoW) miners entirely in an upgrade called the Merge which replaces them with Proof of Stake (PoS).
That merge testnet is now running publicly, without any major problems as far as we are aware, so once it goes live all this huge global hash will have to find something else to compute.
As such you’d expect subsumed mining demand, but the data shows it is up and up instead, presumably because demand is very high.
Source: https://www.trustnodes.com/2022/01/31/ethereums-hashrate-crosses-one-petahash