Some of those miners have turned to a proof-of-work (PoW) fork of Ethereum so they can continue mining. But even Chandler Guo, one of the fork's strongest advocates, thinks only 10% of miners using PoW to mine ETHPOW (the token of the Ethereum Merge fork) or ETC (the token of Ethereum Classic) will ultimately survive.

Ethereum miner Guo told CoinDesk TV’s “First Mover” program on Friday the miners with access to cheaper electricity will be the ones that survive.

“Some people [miners] have free electricity and can [continue] to work on that,” Guo said, referring to the PoW fork. “The other 90%, bankrupt.”

Read more: Ethereum PoW Network Sees Complaints on Day 1 Amid Data Goof-Up

Early Thursday, Ethereum, the second-biggest blockchain after Bitcoin, smoothly made the historic move of migrating from its proof-of-work consensus mechanism to a faster and less-energy-consuming protocol known as proof-of-stake (PoS).