Mining News in April: Bitcoin Halving Effect Emerges, Runes Boom Fades, Angola Paraguay Mining Ban, sponsored by Bitdeer
Title sponsored by Bitdeer, a NASDAQ-listed mining company.
1.
Bitcoin mining company Bitfarms will invest nearly $240 million to upgrade its Bitcoin mining equipment, aims to remain profitable after the Bitcoin halving in 2024. Bitfarms chief financial officer Jeffrey Lucas outlined the firm’s plan to acquire 88,000 highly efficient Bitcoin miners. Bitfarms previously acquired 35,888 Bitmain Bitcoin Miner T21 units. Bitfarms earned 286 BTC through mining in March 2024, with a monthly operating hash rate of 6.5 EH/s.（Cointelegraph）
2.
Arkham has identified a complete list of Marathon’s wallets, holding over $1.1 Billion of Bitcoin across 23 addresses. Marathon is the largest public Bitcoin mining company, at $4.93 Billion mcap.
3.
Paraguayan senators have halted progress on the proposed cryptocurrency mining ban introduced last week, with officials now considering the benefits of selling excess energy from its Itaipu hydropower plant to miners instead of exporting it to Brazil and Argentina. In an April 8 letter to Congress, Buzarquis noted that 45 licensed cryptocurrency miners are expected to reach $125 million by 2025 after miners install more equipment. This comes after several Paraguayan lawmakers introduced a bill that seeks to temporarily ban cryptocurrency mining operations in the country, claiming they are stealing power and disrupting the country’s electricity supply.
4.
Mempool founder mononaut said that A single custodian now controls the coinbase addresses of at least 9 pools, representing 47% of total hashrate. As demonstrated by this consolidation of mining reward outputs from AntPool, F2Pool, Binance Pool, Braiins, btccom, SECPOOL and Poolin. The same custodian also controls ULTIMUSPOOL and 1 TH’s coinbase addresses, and previously received mining rewards from Luxor. Many of the same pools also provide hashrate for AntPool’s transaction accelerator and the custodian frequently accelerates large batch withdrawals using both AntPool and ViaBTC’s transaction acceleration services. mononaut said the custodian is Cobo (institutional custody and settlement provider). And the reason for believing that the custodian actually controls these addresses is that the output of all of them is spent in the same transaction, with no other seemingly plausible explanation.Cobo says that Cobo provides professional wallet private key security storage solutions and risk control for mining pools, but does not deal with block-packed content and hashrate voting, etc.
5.
Bitmain-invested bitcoin mining and cloud mining platform BitFuFu has expanded the hashrate under its operation from 15 EH/s as of June 30 to nearly 23 EH/s as of the end of 2023. In an earnings release for 2023, BitFuFu disclosed that it generated a total revenue of $284 million in 2023. The cloud mining segment contributed $178 million by mining 6,756 BTC for its customers while the proprietary mining segment generated 3,577 bitcoin with a revenue of $100 million. Notably, BitFuFu incurred $166.5 million in 2023 as a cost of revenue to a related party, which was Bitmain.（MinerMag）
6.
Bitmain will release ANTMINER L9 in May, 2024. ANTMINER L9 will support LTC, DOGE, and BEL with an energy efficiency of 0.21 J/M.
7.
Solana’s on-chain mining protocol Ore has announced that it is suspending all mining, the team will be focusing on the development of V2, there is no deadline for reward collection and all existing Ore tokens can be upgraded to the new V2 tokens when they are ready. Mining will resume in a few weeks’ time.
8.
Shares of bitcoin mining companies have fallen sharply of late, with Marathon, Riot, and CleanSpark having fallen for three days in a row, and the Valkyrie Bitcoin Miners ETF down about 28% for the month. This downward trend continues as short interest in cryptocurrency mining stocks continues to grow, and as Iran’s attack on Israel over the weekend causes investors to turn to a risk-averse environment. However, CEOs of mining companies remain bullish on the market, claiming that low-cost operations, more efficient equipment, and growing demand for this asset class could make up for the $10 billion in annual revenue losses due to software updates.（Bloomberg）
9.
In the face of the impending halving of bitcoin and the halving of miners’ incomes, The new CEO of Hut 8, Asher Genoot, explained to DL News how his Bitcoin mining company — one of the biggest in the world — is preparing for the industry-rocking event.
At the cornerstone of Hut 8′s strategy lie two things: its diversified revenue streams and its enormous Bitcoin holdings. The former will help the company mitigate the impact of the halving, and the latter will allow it to seize opportunities that may arise in the aftermath of the halving, according to Genoot. Hut 8 currently has a market capitalization of $900 million and 9,100 BTC on its balance sheet, valued at approximately $573 million. Genoot says it is ready and willing to buy out struggling miners. Not only does it mine Bitcoin, but it has a data centre business and is pursuing opportunities related to artificial intelligence.（DL News）
10.
The Swedish Tax Agency — Skatteverket — investigated the operations of 21 crypto-mining firms between 2020 and 2023. The investigation revealed that 18 crypto-mining firms have filed “misleading or incomplete” information to benefit from tax incentives. The crypto mining firms are required to pay the tax authorities over 990 million Swedish krona ($90 million) in total.（Cointelegraph）
11.
Aethir launched the Qualcomm-powered Aethir Edge product, powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 chip, at Token 2049 in Dubai. As Aethir’s only whitelisted mining product, Aethir Edge earns revenue by sharing excess bandwidth, IP addresses and computing power. By virtue of its license status, Aethir Edge reserves up to 23% of the total $ATH supply of mining rewards for its users.
12.
The Chinese embassy in Angola recently posted an article on its public website saying that Angola’s Law on the Prohibition of Cryptocurrency and Other Virtual Asset Mining came into force on April 10th. Angola, Africa’s third-largest oil producer and once China’s largest supplier of crude oil, has seen a number of Chinese miners traveling to Angola to mine bitcoin. The Chinese Embassy in Angola reminds Chinese citizens and organizations in Angola to strictly abide by the relevant Angolan laws and regulations, use electricity according to the law, and not to support or engage in virtual currency “mining” activities.
13.
East African mining company Gridless operates bitcoin mines in Kenya, Malawi, and Zambia utilizing a variety of renewable energy sources. The company has six mines under its belt and is committed to enabling a protected and decentralized Bitcoin network. Previously, Gridless closed a $2 million seed round in 2022, led by Block, the payments company of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.
14.
A new report from CoinShares notes that miners face a significant increase in costs after the halving of Bitcoin, with power and overall costs nearly doubling, and the average cost of Bitcoin production expected to be around $53,000. Mining companies may turn to artificial intelligence to try to reduce costs by optimizing energy costs and mining efficiency, for example, but the potential benefits of investing obsolete arithmetic equipment into AI could be even higher. miners such as BitDigital, Hive, and Hut 8 are already generating revenue from AI.
15.
The Manitoba pause extension applies to crypto miners’ newrequests and “requests for electric service which have not resulted in the execution of an agreement to construct infrastructure.” In November 2022, the provincial government paused electrical connections to crypto-mining operations for 18 months. Now the pause will last through April 30, 2026. In December 2022, British Columbia announced it would stop making connections to new crypto miners for 18 months.
16.
The PayPal Blockchain Research Group, in tandem with non-profit EnergyWeb, has developed a clean energy validation platform to monitor and reward less energy-intensive bitcoin mining operations. The solution’s development comes as bitcoin generation puts immense strain on local electrical grids and taxpayers in the U.S. PayPal’s proposed solution will distribute bitcoin to “green” bitcoin miners, or individuals who use low-carbon energy sources in their mining operations. Using low-carbon mining methods limits carbon emissions, which slows global warming.（The Block）
17.
Canaan announced that Mr. Nangeng Zhang, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Canaan, and Mr. James Jin Cheng, Chief Financial Officer of Canaan, informed the Company their intention to use their personal funds to jointly purchase no less than US$2 million of the Company’s Class A ordinary shares represented by ADSs.
“We believe that the Company is deeply undervalued, providing a rare investment opportunity for us to pursue,” said Mr. Nangeng Zhang. “The Company is making good progress in streamlining the manufacturing of A14 series mining machines that were previously ordered under contract sales, including bulk orders from public company customers. Additionally, we are eager to see the testing result of the next generation A15 series units, and we are also developing the A16 series in the R&D pipeline. Following our usual practice, we will announce their performance once the machine testing is complete. Now that the fourth bitcoin halving occurred on Friday, we expect many more opportunities will emerge in the bitcoin ecosystem.”
18.
On April 20, the mining pool ViaBTC successfully mined the 840,000th block, the block that was halved, and acquired the epic “rare satoshi”, 32 in total and 4 in existence. ViaBTC launched the auction for the rare satoshi “Epic Sats” at a starting price of 1 BTC. ViaBTC is launching this rare satoshi “Epic Sats” auction, which only supports BTC payments, with a starting price of 1 BTC, and an end time of 00:00 on April 26, 2024 (UTC+8).
19.
Block Inc. (formerly known as Square), the digital payments company led by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, has completed development of its bitcoin mining chip, a three-nanometer chip that powers specialized computers for bitcoin mining. block Inc. said in a statement that it is developing a complete bitcoin mining system as the chip design is completed and is working with a semiconductor foundry to complete the full flow-through of the design.（Bloomberg）
20.
f2pool data shows that at $0.06/kWh, the AntMiner S19, T19, WhatMiner M33S+, M30S+, and less energy-efficient miners are all close to the shutdown price after the halving. As Rune prices rise, miners’ revenues decrease, and the most advanced Bitcoin miners today account for more than 50 percent of the cost of electricity.
21.
NASDAQ-listed coal miner Alliance Resource Partners said in an earnings call that it has mined $30 million in bitcoin using excess power at its facilities. Marshall said that at the end of the quarter, the company had 425 bitcoins on its balance sheet — which it is valuing at $30 million — and after factoring in the net costs of property, plant, and equipment, it was up $7.3 million.（CoinDesk）
22.
According to glassnode, Runes transactions have generated a cumulative $117 million in Bitcoin network fees since the halving, including $62.4 million from Runes transactions on the day of the halving. However, Bitcoin fee revenue has declined significantly over time, with Runes transactions costing $1.03 million on April 28th.
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