As you are all hopefully aware Gridcoin-Research version 4.0.0.0 is out which will fork to a Constant Block Reward at block 1,420,000. The point of this was to provide a more secure blockchain with higher difficulty. There are some large stakeholders that (for understandable security reasons) would only bring their stakes online temporarily, then once they got the interest, go back offline again. CBR means you need to keep your funds staking if you want to earn block rewards, so in theory it should improve matters.
I just noticed this morning a difficulty of over 12 on one block out of he corner of my eye, when I looked further the recent daily Difficlty is around 2-3, todays average is already over 7... Is this people claiming their owed interest before we move to CBR, or is this larger stakeholders bringing weight online; its hard to tell.
We can challenge some of my assumptions by comparing the number of unique staking addresses and total GRC staked as I did in a few posts some weeks ago. For an approximate weekly time range of 7000 blocks we had 1791 unique addresses staking and aroung 112 Million GRC.
Running the program again today reveals:
2342 Addresses Staking
104 Million GRC Staking
My conclusion would be then that we have a bulge of smaller stakeholders trying to get their interest rewards in before CBR.
CBR should come in around Tuesday/Wednesday by my estimate, so we can run this again next week and see what happens.
Happy Crunchin'!