|
During the Spring Festival, with Bitcoin breaking through the $50,000 mark and Ethereum breaking through the $1,900 mark, the two major mainstream cryptocurrencies continued to set new historical highs, and the crypto market was boiling.
According to CoinMetrics data, Bitcoin miners earned more than $354 million last week, the highest level ever on the Bitcoin blockchain, surpassing the previous record of $340 million set in mid-December 2017. In addition, the latest data also shows that Bitcoin miners' cumulative revenue in January 2021 reached $1.09 billion, an increase of $70 million from the monthly revenue of $1.02 billion after the bear market in January 2018. It is predicted that Bitcoin miners' revenue is expected to reach a record high of $1.25 billion in February 2021.
The continued high popularity and high returns attracted entrants. On February 8, the Internet company 9th City (Nasdaq: NCTY) announced that it had signed a legally binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) with six mining machine owners to purchase a batch of Bitcoin digital currency mining machines by issuing new shares. This batch of equipment will include Bitcoin mining machines of different brands such as Bitmain, Avalon and Shenma, with a total of 10,489 units, with a total computing power of about 251PH/S. The mining machines have been deployed in Xinjiang, Qinghai, Inner Mongolia and other places. 9th City also announced that it has signed a formal purchase agreement with the five mining machine owners who signed the purchase memorandum on January 25 this year. 26,007 Bitcoin mining machines will be officially delivered to 9th City and included in the Bitcoin mining amount of 9th City. After the two purchases are completed, 9th City will have deployed a total of 36,496 Bitcoin mining machines, with a total computing power upgraded to about 800PH/S.
On February 10, as the price of cryptocurrencies soared, unknown local customers in Russia have purchased tens of thousands of mining machines. An executive of BitRiver, Russia's largest crypto mining hosting service provider, said that a local customer has purchased more than 20,000 crypto mining equipment. These mining machines were imported from Asia and cost between $40 million and $60 million. BitRiver also disclosed information about the customers who purchased the batch of mining machines, and did not disclose the specific models of the mining machines. These mining machines will be placed at a site owned by BitRiver in Siberia.
On February 17, Blockcap, a US bitcoin miner, said in a statement that it had purchased 10,000 Antminer S19s produced by Bitmain to double its hash. At the current difficulty of bitcoin mining, Blockcap's existing machines can provide about 950PH/s of computing power, which can generate about 5.5 bitcoins in 24 hours.
On February 18, Bitcoin mining machine manufacturer EBON will launch its Bitcoin mining business. It is reported that the company plans to operate its Bitcoin mining business by deploying a combination of self-produced mining machines and mining machines purchased from other manufacturers, as well as renting computing power from other mining farms. At the same time, the company also plans to build a data center to support Bitcoin mining activities.
On February 18, Sun International (08029-HK) announced that Extra Blossom Holdings Limited (the company's indirect wholly-owned subsidiary, the buyer) and Mindfulness Venture Fund I, LP (the seller) entered into a non-legally binding memorandum of understanding on the proposed transfer and transfer of equipment. Accordingly, the seller intends to transfer and transfer and the buyer intends to accept the transfer and transfer of equipment cryptocurrency mining equipment, including a total of 1,000 cryptocurrency mining machines Bitmain Antminer S19, Bitmain Antminer T19, MicroBT Whatsminer M32 and MicroBT Whatsminer M31S. The price payable for the equipment will be further negotiated by the parties to the memorandum of understanding, and the buyer will cause the company to allot and issue new shares (issue price of HK$0.321 per share) or any other type of consideration to the seller. The seller is a limited partnership established in the Cayman Islands, mainly engaged in the provision of equipment for the operation of cryptocurrency mines in Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Sichuan Provinces in China. The Board believes that the entering into of the Memorandum of Understanding will enable the Group to invest in new businesses and diversify the Group’s development.
On February 19, blockchain and robotics solutions company Bots Inc announced that it had placed an order for 1,000 Bitcoin mining machines worth $4 million. As a result, BTZI is now planning to develop a large-scale Bitcoin mining farm in West Virginia, with the potential to expand to 50,000 Bitcoin mining machines once initial tests show promising results.
Interestingly, Waqar Zaka, a well-known Pakistani TV and video host, also tweeted that the Iranian government is now said to have more than 45,000 Bitcoin mining machines. This could help Iran become one of the richest countries in the world and avoid economic sanctions imposed by the United States. Earlier reports said that Iran has lifted its ban on cryptocurrencies and has entered the field of Bitcoin mining. The government announced that it would buy all Bitcoin produced by local miners. Bitcoin supporter Max Keiser believes that Iran and Venezuela could make trillions of dollars by entering the cryptocurrency mining market.
It is worth noting that although Bitcoin mining is currently highly profitable, the cost of mining is also increasing due to the intensified bidding war for mining equipment, especially the recent rapid rise in Bitcoin prices, many ASIC machine owners can sell mining machines at a 70% premium. Since February, the price of Bitcoin has risen by nearly 50%, and global demand has shown no signs of slowing down.
Not only Bitcoin mining, but also with the surge in Ethereum, miners are also frantically buying up. Take Nvidia's latest and most powerful 30 series as an example, the prices of 3060 and 3070 have almost doubled. Against this background, Nvidia announced the launch of NVIDIA CMP in a blog post on February 18, which is a cryptocurrency mining processor designed specifically for Ethereum. The product does not support processing graphics, which allows miners to get better performance.
In fact, facing the surge in Ethereum, it is not surprising that Nvidia launched dedicated mining chips. In the bull market of 2017, Ethereum miners also bought up graphics cards, and Nvidia launched dedicated mining chips such as P104 and P106.
It is worth mentioning that not only Bitcoin and Ethereum mining, but also Filecoin computing power is increasing. On February 16, Internet company 9th City (Nasdaq: NCTY) announced that it had signed a framework agreement worth $10 million with Filecoin mining machine service providers to purchase Filecoin mining machine server clusters and technical services in cash. Prior to this, 9th City had purchased a Filecoin mining machine group and started Filecoin mining. At present, 9th City has independent nodes in the Filecoin network, with a total of 8PByte of effective storage computing power, and the computing power is continuing to increase. (Golden Finance) |
