Seven major mining pools have annual revenues of over 10 million yuan, and more than 100 cloud computing contracts are losing money

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The average mining pool earned $4.2853 million in mining fees throughout the year, and the annual income of the seven major mining pools exceeded 10 million

Mining is one of the few sustainable and profitable industries besides exchanges.

According to PAData's earlier revenue statistics on EOS nodes, the average annual income of the elected nodes is only about 1.0898 million US dollars, while the average annual mining fee income of the Bitcoin mining pool exceeds 582 Bitcoins, which is equivalent to 4.2853 million US dollars according to the subsequent annual average coin price of 7,365.21 US dollars corrected by CoinMetrics. Among them, BTC.com, which has the highest mining fee income, earned about 26.2256 million US dollars in the whole year. Other mining pools that earned more than 10 million US dollars in mining fees include F2Pool, AntPool, Poolin, SlushPool, ViaBTC and BTC.TOP.

If calculated based on the average annual computing power share of major mining pools, then with 1% of the computing power of the entire network, the mining fee that can be obtained throughout the year is as high as 1.84 million US dollars. Under the scale effect of Bitcoin mining pools, the difference in handling fee income between large and small mining pools is relatively large. There are 10 mining pools whose annual handling fee income is only 100,000 US dollars. These mining pools face greater survival pressure. The income structure of mining pools is mainly a commission on mining income. In addition to mining fees, mining income also includes a block reward of 12.5 bitcoins per block. If calculated based on the general commission rate of 3% in the FPPS model, the annual estimated income of BTC.com, the largest Bitcoin mining pool, is about 26.495 million US dollars. F2Pool also has an estimated annual income of more than 20 million US dollars, reaching 20.0677 million US dollars. In addition, Poolin, AntPool, SlushPool, ViaBTC, and BTC.TOP also have an estimated annual income of more than 10 million US dollars. According to statistics, in 2019, the average mining fee of major mining pools accounted for about 2.89% of the total revenue, slightly higher than the overall average of 2.80% of the Bitcoin network (see "Revealing the 2019 Bitcoin Chain Data: Global Miners' Annual Total Revenue of About 5.2 Billion US Dollars, Coinbase Becomes the "Gold King""). This may be a reflection of the scale effect of the mining pool, or it may be that the mining pool is more "lucky" and the handling fee included in the block is higher. Among them, Eobot's mining fee accounts for the highest proportion of total revenue, reaching 9.31%, and 1M1X also reached 7.08%. Other mining pools with a relatively high proportion of mining fees include Hummerpool, BitMinter, Bixin and Solo CK, all of which account for more than 3.5%.

In addition, the average empty block rate of major mining pools in 2019 was about 0.55%, lower than the 0.58% of the whole network. Among them, SecretSuperstar had the highest empty block rate, reaching 9.09%. Others that exceeded the average level included Hummerpool, Bixin, BTC.com, AntPool, Huobi.pool, and BytePool.

Empty blocks refer to blocks that do not contain transaction information but still contain Coinbase. Miners can earn income by mining empty blocks. Since mining pools operate non-stop, they need to find as many blocks as possible in order to obtain higher profits, and empty blocks will be mined in the process. The controversy over empty blocks mainly focuses on whether mining empty blocks by mining pools will cause network congestion. However, as far as the current situation is concerned, this problem is not obvious from the average empty block rate of mining pools.

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The low income of cloud computing power products is not proportional to the contract period. Cloud computing power mining is a new product derived from the mining industry in 2019. This is a mining method in which users purchase computing power contracts on the platform, lease a certain amount of computing power for mining, and obtain digital currency regularly within the contract period. The current mainstream cloud computing power platforms include BitDeer, Huobi Mining Pool, OXBTC, Suanyi Investment, RHY, Hunli Nest, KGfire, Nicehash, etc. PAData selected 28 Bitcoin cloud computing power products from 5 platforms for statistics to observe the development of cloud computing power mining in 2019. According to statistics, BitDeer is the platform that provides the most Bitcoin cloud computing power products, with a total of 12 products, followed by Suanyi Investment, with a total of 6 products. The total cost of all 28 products per TH/s computing power (including computing power cost and electricity cost) is about US$0.1363. Among them, the total cost of the earliest cloud computing power product launched by Huobi Mining Pool reached US$0.2261/T per day, which is the highest cost among all cloud computing power products. Other cloud computing products with costs exceeding $0.2/T per day include four products under Suanyi Investment, which reached $0.2110/T and $0.2096/T respectively.

Among them, the average electricity cost of 28 products reached 0.0759 US dollars/T, which is equivalent to 0.5228 yuan/T at the exchange rate of 6.8867. The highest cloud computing power product is still the cloud computing power product first launched by Huobi Mining Pool, with an electricity cost of 0.1483 US dollars/T, which is equivalent to about 1.0214 yuan/T in RMB. This is much higher than the electricity price of 0.3 yuan/T-0.5 yuan/T obtained by ordinary mining pools. Cloud computing power products have high costs, but they do not make much money, and even lose money. According to statistics, excluding management fees, the average income of 28 products is only 0.0155 US dollars/T, which is even lower than the average cost. This is mainly affected by the inverted income of some products. Among them, the products launched by Huobi Mining Pool in the early stage can no longer obtain revenue records (recorded as 0 in this statistics). In addition, the revenue of another product of Huobi Mining Pool is -0.0760 USD/T. The cloud computing power products of Suanyi Investment are all loss-making, and the one with the largest loss is -0.0585 USD/T. In addition, RHY also launched an incredible newcomer exclusive product (the value is abnormal and not included in the above statistics), with a total cost of 35.90 USD/T, but the revenue is only 0.16 USD/T, and an additional 5% management fee must be paid.

The contract periods of the 28 cloud computing products within the statistical scope range from 30 days to 1095 days (3 years), but the length of the contract period is not proportional to the level of income, that is, the longer the contract period, does not mean a higher net income.

For example, the net income of the 1095-day cloud computing power contract on OXBTC is similar to that of the 180-day cloud computing power contract on BitDeer. However, on the same platform, cloud computing power products with longer contract periods have higher returns. For example, the overall return of the 1095-day product on OXBTC is slightly higher than that of the 180-day product. The benefit of cloud computing power products is that miners save all the risks and costs in the steps of purchasing mining machines, deploying mining machines, operating and maintaining mining machines, and do not need to consider how to deal with mining machines and sites after exiting mining, which lowers the threshold for mining. But this is just an idealistic vision. The reality is that the pricing model and profit model of cloud computing power products need more development and innovation to truly attract new users and expand the scale of participation in the mining industry.