Ethereum merge

It is expected to happen by end of September. Mining will stop in most, if not all, mining pools automatically.

What about the hashrate?

Miners have heavy investments in GPUs and that is not fully recovered from the past two years. While there are rumors of an Ethereum POW chain continuing, no one I have spoken to is actually considering them. The hashrate will migrate elsehwere, while some might sell hardware, there are still POW blockchains out there. ASICs will be limited.

Which cryptos will be mined

Given the high hashrates available on ETH it is expected that much of it willl migrate to algos that do well with NVidia and AMD cards. The most discussed ones are

• Ravencoin #RVN coin
• ERGo #ERG coin
• Ethereum Classic #ETC mostly for ASIC

What is the ROI

While the ROI is positive the timeline is years even with energy removed. RVN and ERG are both projects without any actual utility at this point. Much of it is vaporware. There are however many projects that have utility. Miners will mine what is available and convert the value to more useful coins for holding a share of their income.