Ethereum miners achieved record revenue in May, allowing them to earn more than Bitcoin for the second time this year.

Ethereum miners outperform Bitcoin miners in May and earn $2.35 billion

Monthly mining revenue on the Ethereum blockchain reached $2.35 billion in May, according to statistics from CoinMetrics, compared to $1.45 billion for Bitcoin. In February, Ethereum’s mining revenue just surpassed Bitcoin, from $1.37 billion to $1.36 billion. Otherwise, Bitcoin mining tends to dominate gross revenue, though not always profitability.

Proof-of-work mining requires people to dedicate their computing power to help protect the network. It is the process by which new transactions are processed on the network and new tokens are created.

Mining revenue consists of two elements: block rewards and transaction fees. Every time someone extracts a transaction block and adds it to the blockchain, they receive a certain number of newly created tokens. In the case of Bitcoin, it’s 6.25 BTC ($227,000) every 10 minutes; for Ethereum, it’s two ETH ($5,100) every 13 or so seconds.

Just over $1 billion of revenue from ETH miners last month came from fees, compared with $130 million for BTC. Ethereum’s transaction fees consistently outperformed Bitcoin.