Muir Glacier Hard Fork Reduced ETH Block Time By 25%

The Muir Glacier Ethereum (ETH) Hard fork has brought the mining algorithm difficulty to decrease as well as the average block time of Ethereum blockchain has also decreased by almost a quarter (25%).

Ethereum average block time chart provided by etherscan.io shows that from January 1 to January 4 average block time was reduced from 17.16 to 12.96 seconds, which means roughly 24.48% shorter block time.

The amount of blocks mined per day obviously increased, leading to Ether (ETH) inflation.

As Etherscan’s block count and rewards chart shows, the amount of blocks created on January 1 is estimated in 4,980 with total daily block reward of 10,273 Ether. On January 4 the amount of blocks reached 6,570 blocks, and daily reward — 13,437 Ether. This translates into 32% of increase in blocks per day and over 31% increase in block rewards.

The changes are a consequence of Muir Glacier hard fork, covered in a report shared by CryptoTheNews. The fork is aimed at delaying the ”Ice Age” of Ethereum for 611 days. Ice Age stands for increasing network difficulty to the point where mining the chain becomes almost impossible.

The Ice Age protocol will come through a series of ”difficulty bombs” and finally prevent miners from mining old Ethereum blockchain after Ethereum 2.0 with proof-of-stake algorithm is live.