In China, the price of graphics processing units (GPUs), commonly used to mine Ethereum, has plummeted after the second-largest cryptocurrency by capitalization switched to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus algorithm.
China Graphics Card
The local retailer announced that the price of the RTX 3080 has dropped from 8,000 yuan ($1,116 at current exchange rates) to 5,000 yuan ($698). Logll team followed the drop in video card prices earlier: ETH Merger and price cuts for NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards
Mining with Graphics Card
“When bitcoin mining was at its peak, people from the mining companies would just go into stores with cash and take all the video cards we had. Now look at the stores. No one is buying new computers because of the coronavirus, let alone video cards,”.
Another market source said low-cost graphics cards such as MSI and Qicai’s RTX 3080 have dropped by about 1,000-2,000 yuan ($139-279) in two months. According to interlocutors, it was influenced by “hype around The Ethereum Merge“.
“I had a customer who bought an RTX 3080 card for 9,400 yuan late last year, and now he has to sell it for less than half that price,” he said.
Graphics card prices are falling
The decline in demand was also recorded by online platforms Taobao and JD. GPU prices fell by “several hundred yuan,” according to the publication.
On September 15, 2022, Ethereum activated The Merge update, which moved the blockchain to a PoS algorithm and reduced its energy consumption by 99%.
