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The Ethereum Foundation, which manages the Ether cryptocurrency, has announced completion of what it calls the Merge, whereby validation of new blocks of transactions no longer takes place by "mining". The millions of high-end graphics cards that are used for this will no longer beneeded for the new "proof-of-stake" approach, so that most of these will likely find their way into the used card market. This will depress demand for new graphics cards just when Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) is set to announce its next-generation GeForce 40 series.

Ethereum completes its transition to proof-of-stake, ending lucrative and energy consuming "mining"

The transition of Ethereum to proof-of-stake was called the Merge because it involved combining the parallel block chain that was already using proof-of-stake experimentally with the main block chain that was using traditional mining, called proof-of-work. This is shown below in this diagram from the Ethereum Foundation: