Hashrate-Shipment Coefficient Update: February 2024
In January, bitcoin’s hashrate had a somewhat wild swing resulting from power curtailment activities during a Texas cold outbreak. At one point, the total real-time hashrate reported by major bitcoin mining pools dropped to 425 EH/s.
Despite that brief interruption, the average bitcoin hashrate in January reached 521.32 EH/s, which was an all-time high and up about 3% compared to December.
In the meantime, the total block rewards in January declined to about 31.3k BTC, down from over 36.6k BTC in December as the transaction fees subsided.
The decrease in transaction fees and the increase in hashrate sent bitcoin’s daily production benchmark to less than 1.94 BTC/EH/s, which appears inevitable since mining participants are rushing to plug into the network ahead of the halving.
For perspective, 1 EH/s of computing power on average was able to produce 3.5 BTC a day in January 2023. Even with the transaction fee spike, the same amount of the hashrate could only mine 2.33 BTC in December. The number is expected to reduce by 50% immediately after halving and the industry will likely go through a struggling period until the network hashrate finds an equilibrium.
Regarding bitcoin hardware shipment to the U.S. over the past month, we observed an increasing amount of ancillary equipment such as power supply units, cooling towers, Antbox containers and fans, in addition to Bitmain’s continuous import of S19XPs.
These supply units were all shipped from Bitmain’s subsidiary in Hainan, China, and were imported by various mining operations such as DMG, Marathon, and Genesis Digital Assets (GDA).
GDA’s import of cooling towers and containers accounted for nearly 30% of the identified miner imports in January with over 250 metric tons. It is a clear sign that GDA is deploying immersion and hydro-cooling miners most likely in Texas.
Marathon, on the other hand, has been importing exclusively power supply units directly from Bitmain since September. It obtained another batch of 7,000 PSUs in January, which added to more than 12,000 units that were imported in October. This may be indicative of Marathon’s preparation works for ramping up hashrate at the proprietary sites it acquired recently in Texas and Nebraska.
Other imports in January included the usual activities such as Synos Corp obtained more electrical components for manufacturing pre-ordered WhatsMiner equipment and Bitmain’s US subsidiary continued to load up on its inventory of S19XPs.
We had previously projected bitcoin’s January average hashrate to be 553 EH/s. In February, we have found additional miner import records that were not identified in previous months. The new dataset now estimates that January’s average hashrate should be even higher, at 573 EH/s, with the average in February expected to remain steadily at that level.
That means the daily bitcoin production benchmark could drop below 1.8 BTC/EH/s in February and most mining companies may expect the production to be much lower than January.
