Miner Weekly: Pubcos Capture Record 25% of Bitcoin Mining Rewards
Despite low profits and high difficulty, some pubcos are doubling down on mining
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This article first appeared in Miner Weekly, BlocksBridge Consulting’s weekly newsletter curating the latest news in bitcoin mining and data analysis from TheMinerMag. Subscribe to receive in your inbox once a week.
September was a landmark month for bitcoin mining, as several publicly traded mining companies achieved new milestones. The bitcoin network’s hashrate, a measure of mining compute power, surged to an all-time high of 700 exahashes per second (EH/s). This unprecedented level of mining activity led to a corresponding increase in mining difficulty and a decline in daily bitcoin rewards.
One notable consequence of this surge was a significant drop in profitability for individual miners. According to data from TheMinerMag, a fleet of 10,000 S19 Pro mining machines—which collectively equals 1 EH/s of hashrate and costs $8 million based on the current spot price listed on resale websites—would have generated an average of only 0.7 BTC per day in September.
This difficulty spike can be attributed to the relentless expansion of the newest-generation mining fleets by publicly traded mining giants since bitcoin’s last halving. Marathon Digital (Nasdaq: MARA) achieved a significant milestone, surpassing 30 EH/s of realized hashrate for the first time in September.
Four of the five companies in the 20+ EH/s range—Riot (RIOT), CleanSpark (CLSK), Iris Energy (IREN)—are racing to reach the 30 EH/s mark soon. Core Scientific, however, is diversifying by reallocating some of its mining capacity toward high-performance computing (HPC) applications, such as artificial intelligence (AI).
Meanwhile, companies in the 10 EH/s range, including Bitfarms (BITF), Cipher (CIFR), Terawulf (WULF), and Bitdeer (BTDR), are working hard to catch up.
Data tracked by TheMinerMag shows that the 16 public mining companies it monitors collectively mined 24.6% of all bitcoin rewards in September—an increase from 22.76% in August. This represents the highest market share recorded since mining companies began going public.
It is important to note that these figures exclude other public mining firms that report proprietary mining results only on a quarterly basis, such as Galaxy Digital (GLXY), BitFuFu (FUFU), Canaan (CAN), and Greenidge Generation (GREE). In Q2, these companies held a combined market share of 0.5%. If their production figures were included for September, public mining companies would have accounted for approximately a quarter of all bitcoin rewards.
Some of the pubcos are also poised for further growth, with even more mining machines set to be deployed in the final quarter of this year, following previous orders.🙂
Finally, September saw another milestone for public mining companies—the total bitcoin (BTC) held by these firms surpassed the 60,000 BTC mark for the first time. As of Sep. 30, 10 companies collectively held 60,878 BTC, valued at approximately $3.7 billion. MARA accounted for 44% of that total.
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