Unfortunately, the situation with the Ethereum transactions is much worse than we expected. Everybody expected the fees in the Ethereum network to be low and transactions to be cheap. The opposite has happened, the transaction price is as high as before. The ETH is now burned as expected by the coin developers but the Ethereum users are still paying the same high price for the transactions. 🤷♂️
Moreover, the pool couldn’t send the transactions using low gas prices as before. We must send the payouts with the so-called base cost of gas. Currently, it is higher than 40 gwei. We are forced to change the payout model of our Ethereum pool. All the details are revealed in this post.
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Default Payout Value Is 1 ETH
No panic if that is too high. You could always adjust this value. We take care of our miners and we don’t want you to receive the payout of 0.005 ETH with 0.003 ETH fees paid to leave you 0.002 ETH only. We see these situations happening in other pools every day.
Payouts Are Covered By The Miners
UPDATE: Currently the maximum gas price is set to 80 gwei so the maximum fee is $5.5.
From now on the miners would pay the fees for the payouts they receive from Ethereum Pool. We set the gas price to 51 gwei so the maximum fee is just $3 (if ETH price is $2,800). That means that if the gas price is very high the pool will wait until it gets lower to execute the payment. Let us give you an example.
Currently, Ethereum’s price is $2,800. Each transaction always costs 21,000 gas. There are different scenarios depending on the current gas price (Base Fee Per Gas).
- The gas price is 10 gwei.
The miner pays 10 x 21,000 x 2,800$ / 1,000,000,000 = $0.588 - The gas price is 40 gwei.
The miner pays 40 x 21,000 x 2,800$ / 1,000,000,000 = $2.352 - The gas price is 80 gwei.
The miner should pay 80 x 21,000 x 2,800$ / 1,000,000,000 = $4.704
That is higher than $3. So the pool will wait until the gas price becomes lower and then execute the payout. If Ethereum’s price is $2,800 the pool will execute the payouts if only the gas price is lower than 51 gwei.
Payout Value Is Adjustable
You could set the payout value on the Account Settings tab. It could be set in the range from 0.005 ETH to 10 ETH. Your mining rig IP address is required to apply the settings. Please be patient after you adjust the payout value as it could take a couple of minutes before it is shown on the statistics page due to the website cache. If you couldn’t find your IP address (How to find my IP address?) please feel free to contact our Helpdesk. We would be glad to adjust your payout value manually.
Please remember that you pay the payout fee so if you set a very low minimum payout then a big percent of the coins would be spent to cover the payout itself. Let’s assume the current gas price (Base Fee Per Gas) is 40 gwei and you set the minimum payout to 0.005 ETH.
That means that the transaction will cost you
40 x 21,000 / 1,000,000,000 = 0.00084 ETH
That is almost 17% of your payout and you receive only 0.005 – 0.00084 = 0.00416 ETH at your wallet.
What Is Base Fee Per Gas and Where To Find It?
The Base Fee Per Gas is the base cost of gas, a fixed value, smoothly changing depending on the network load. If the expected transaction numbers are high, the base cost increases and vice versa. This value substitutes the gas price used before. It could be found on Etherscan.io for example.
Just click the last block mined and search for the “Base Fee Per Gas” value.
New Statistics Pages
Thanks to the London hard fork situation we’ve upgraded the Ethereum pool API and statistics pages.
Now you could see:
- Detailed statistics of your workers
- Share statistics (valid, invalid, stale)
- Adjust the payout value
Why Some Unpaid Balance Is Left In The Pool?
Gas Price Is Not Predictable
Gas price is always different. As mentioned before the new Ethereum transaction system (so-called Type 2) uses the base fee per gas value. Before the payout is executed the pool doesn’t know the gas price which would be used. All we could set at the pool as a transaction sender is the maximum gas value. Currently, it is set to 51 gwei so each payout costs less than $3 to the miner.
The pool blocks 51 gwei x 21,000 gas to execute the payout to the standard ETH address. If the base fee required to execute the transaction was just 30 gwei then 21 gwei x 21,000 gas is returned back to the unpaid balance of the miner.
Please find the approximate calculation below
21,000 * 21 / 1,000,000,000 = 0.000441 ETH ($1.23 if ETH price is $2,800) is returned to the unpaid balance of the miner.
Payouts to Different Ethereum Address Types
The payouts require a variable amount of gas. A standard ETH address to address transaction uses 21,000 gas. A smart contract could easily use 30,000-50,000 gas or even more (Smart contract wallets are usually used by cryptocurrency exchanges). Our pool gas limit is 55,000 gas. We highly recommend all the miners use standard ETH addresses to receive the payouts e.g. Coinomi, Trust, MEW, or Metamask. They require only 21,000 gas. It saves your money!
The first payout to the miner the pool reserves 55,000 gas at the miner account. There are 2 possible scenarios.
The Miner Address Is a Smart Contract
If the transaction used 35,000 gas for example, then 20,000 gas is credited back to the unpaid balance of the miner. The address is marked as a smart contract. For all future payouts, the pool will reserve 55,000 gas at the miner account. At the moment there is no workaround to avoid that. Ethereum network has no functionality to predict the gas value required by the smart contract before its execution.
Let us give you an example.
The miner has 0.61 ETH of the unpaid balance. He set the payout value to 0.6 ETH. The payout process has been triggered.
Let’s say the Ethereum price is $2,800, the base fee per gas is 20 gwei, and the miner uses an address generated on the crypto exchange. For example it requires 40,000 gas.
- 55,000 gas is reserved at price 51 gwei -> 55,000 * 51 / 1,000,000,000 = 0.002805 ETH ($7.85)
- 40,000 gas at price 20 gwei was required to execute the payout 0.0008 ETH ($2.24)
- 0.002805 – 0.0008 = 0.002005 ETH ($5.61) would be credited back to the unpaid balance of the miner
The Miner Has a Standard Address
If the transaction used just 21,000 gas, unused gas is credited back to the unpaid balance of the miner. The address is marked as a standard address (not a smart contract). For all future payouts, the pool will not reserve any additional gas at the miner account. 21,000 gas would be used. That means that if you use the standard Ethereum address the amount blocked at the pool is always less compared to the smart contract address. Starting from the second payment from the pool, all the coins would be sent to the miner except the 21,000 gas x (difference between the 51 gwei and base fee). This amount would be credited back to the unpaid balance of the miner as discussed above.
We apologize for any inconvenience we could have caused you. Unfortunately, the current situation was created not by us but by the Ethereum developers. We don’t see any positive sides of this Ethereum update currently. The only thing is that every minute almost 4 ETH is burned creating deflation that according to the ETH developers is going to lead to the coin price increase.
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