Meet the new billion-dollar mining company club: Bit Digital (BTBT), Hive Blockchain (HIVE), Riot Blockchain (RIOT), Marathon Patent Group (MARA) and Northern Data (NB2).
 

All five companies hit $1 billion market values in the past two weeks, although they followed bitcoin’s price action on Monday, dipping slightly below their peaks as the week opened (see below). 
 

Four of the five firms, moreover, are handily outperforming bitcoin as mining companies tend to do during bullish market cycles. Over the past 12 months, the share prices for Bit Digital, Hive, Riot and Marathon have each returned four-digit percentage gains. Bitcoin is up a comparatively meager 300% over the same period.
 

Sometimes a billion dollars can sound like not all that much money. But this milestone represents enormous growth for these firms and demonstrates the strength of the cryptocurrency industry’s current bullish trend. 
 

Bit Digital, for example, had a valuation of barely $6 million a year ago. And when Riot pivoted to cryptocurrency mining in October 2017, it only had a $50 million market value.

Beyond great returns for shareholders, these soaring market values signal strong interest in mining, not just buying or trading cryptocurrency. People who want exposure to the red-hot bitcoin market and public bitcoin-related companies are finding mining companies that hold bitcoin a useful way to achieve this. 

Revenue per terahash per second (TH/s) tripled in three months, reaching $0.32 on January 8. Revenue hasn’t reached these levels since summer 2019, according to data from Hashrate Index. In early October, miners were earning just $0.076 per TH/s.
 

Not surprisingly, revenue dipped a decent bit on Monday per the above chart following bitcoin’s price action. But the overall strong trend of increasingly profitability for miners is fueling even stronger demand for more mining machines from manufacturers or on secondary markets.

After the price increases, those with old-generation equipment are even operating with wide margins. Thomas Heller estimated that the cost to mine 1 BTC is roughly $12,000 given the current difficulty, an electricity cost of $0.04 per kWh, and an S9 with 85 W/TH efficiency.

• Bitcoin price dumps back to $30,000.
  • After hitting $42,000 on a few exchanges last week, bitcoin bulls took a breather, letting the price slide all the way to nearly $30,000 on Monday. Year-to-date bitcoin gains have dropped from over 40% to roughly 10%. After the drop, CNN declared bitcoin is back in a bear market.
• Mining difficulty jumped 11% to pass 20 trillion.
  • Bitcoin’s mining difficulty increased significantly after the latest difficulty adjustment happened Saturday at block 665,280. Current difficulty is now 20.6 trillion with another double-digit percentage upward adjustment projected for around January 23. (CoinDesk)
• A Chinese lottery company plans to spend $14.4 million on ASICs.
  • 500.com (WBAI) is a public Chinese lottery firm that said it plans to issue $14.4 million worth of new shares to acquire machines from Bitmain and MicroBT that are expected to total 918 PH/s in hash power. Shares have soared 350% in the pat month. (CoinDesk)
• Good luck trying to order from Bitmain.
  • Bitmain’s store website has disabled the ability to pre-order T19, S19, or S19 Pro machines. All models still show August 2021 shipping dates, but now users can’t even add a pre-order to their carts.
• Bitfarms wants to raise another $15 million.
  • The Toronto-based public mining company announced a second private round of shares placements for institutional investors. The round should finance CAD$20 million, or roughly $15 million. Bitfarms closed its first CAD$20 million round on January 7. (AP)

Kazakhstan Mining: Read the unique advantages and challenges Kazakh bitcoin miners face in the Hashr8 research team’s latest report. A valid email address is required to download the report.

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