The Ethereum network’s transition from a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus is likely to flood the crypto industry with out-of-work Ether miners, causing severe disruption to all PoW tokens.

Andy Long, CEO of Bitcoin miner White Rock believes the upcoming Ethereum Merge will force PoW miners to look for greener pastures, such as other PoW blockchains, and thus “swamp” other coins — increasing mining difficulty and reducing profitability.

“As GPU miners point their hardware at other chains their difficulty will increase causing lower returns and splitting the reward amongst more miners,” Long said.

He added that the migration will likely force many crypto miners to give up and abandon their expensive mining rigs.

“Hash rate will flow to alternative GPU PoW coins, and many miners will simply give up and try to sell off their farms of cards,” he said.

“Some miners will try to sell their High-Performance Computing (HPC) or GPU cloud services and will likely fail since there’s too much capacity chasing a limited amount of demand,” he added.