Some Miners Attempt to Halt Ethereum Upgrade

Major Signals

• Right now the miner community is split by opinions for and against the stop call.
• Ethermine, one of three biggest mining pools, is part of the movement.
• 9 smaller mining pools have joined the "STOPEIP1559" movement.

There is a giant among them though, as they are joined by one of the three largest pools, Ethermine, by itself accounting for nearly 21% of the network’s hash power. Together, the nine's power amounts to 28.1% in the past week.

Bitfly, the operator of Ethermine, tweeted that "Ethermine is against adopting EIP-1559 in its current state because we believe that Ethereum's future may be at risk."

On the other side, the website lists eleven pools, including the other two of the largest pools, Spark Pool and F2Pool - the latter two together accounting for some 36% of the network’s hash power over the past week, per Etherscan.

However, the 'againsts' are seemingly louder than the 'fors.' Save for a somewhat ambiguous tweet by Chun Wang, co-founder and administrator of F2Pool, there doesn't seem to be any official announcements from either F2Pool or Spark Pool.

Wang confirmed that, as he mentioned in his tweet earlier, "We support EIP 1559." He added that he'll "speak at ETHDenver on this topic next month and will share with the community more details over the next few weeks."

What's more, there are some contradictory comments online, reportedly coming from Spark Pool, one of them suggesting that this major pool is actually against the proposal. Their Twitter comments may imply so as well. If that's the case, Ethermine and Spark Pool would together account for some 45% of hash power.

Spark Pool released this comment.

The move to block the proposal comes after minor mining pool Flexpool announced earlier this month that they stand against the proposal, given that it would mean paying miners "significantly less for the same work," that large mining pools control 51% of the network and can implement changes without the consent of miners, and that fees would be destroyed instead of paid to miners, they said.

Flexpool mined 11 blocks and ETH 28 in December, and has accounted for 0.04% of the hash power in the last seven days. Though tiny, it's urging miners to stop supporting the pools which they say have the power to control the network, and stand against the EIP.