Life is good for miners as revenues continue to “moon” along with coin prices. Bitcoin miners raked in over $1.1 billion in total revenue last month. Ether miners took in a record $830 million. 

Not surprisingly, over 40% of ether mining revenue came from fees in January. Use of the network and corresponding transaction costs reached record levels as attention and capital returned to Ethereum’s decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. 

In early January, for example, average Ethereum transaction fees priced in dollars nearly doubled the precious fee record set in September 2020 during the latest DeFi craze, according to data from Blockchair. 

Fees represented just over 10% of total bitcoin mining revenue over the same period, continuing a strong trend of double-digit percentage revenue coming from network fees. Over $1 billion in total revenue is also the highest mark since December 2017. 

In short, life is good for cryptocurrency miners. And if bull market asset prices continues climb, revenue can be expected to follow suit.

Making some of the cryptocurrency industry’s biggest news of the year, Tesla bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin. A recent SEC filing shows the company bought bitcoin in January after amending its corporate investment policies. 

The market reacted strongly to the news of Tesla’s investment, with bitcoin spiking nearly 15% when the news broke. 

But what does it mean for miners?

Long term, the investment doesn’t hold too much importance on its own. But it signals a continuation of the new trend of companies allocating to bitcoin, and more buyers are always good news for miners. 

More specifically, the price action after the news gave miners a nice little windfall as revenue per terahash per second shot up above $0.28, its highest market in over a month. Later in the day, it continued to climb to nearly $0.33, the highest level in over 1.5 years.

As the market digests this news, it’s impossible to say which direction the price will take next. But with MicroStrategy, Square, and Tesla all allocating corporate funds to bitcoin, it’s not unreasonable to expect other public companies to follow suit. And the likely ensuing upward price movements will be gifts as welcome to miners as they will be to every other investor. 

• Bitcoin price nearly hits $48,000.

  • Gaining over 20% in the past 24 hours, bitcoin continued to climb after news broke of Tesla’s $1.5 billion investment. So far in 2021, bitcoin’s gains have extended to over 50%.

• Mining difficulty increased again.

  • Bitcoin mining difficulty increased nearly 3% at the end of last week to above 21.4 trillion. This was the third consecutive positive adjustment, and, based on the current epoch, difficulty will increase again in a little over a week.

• A shipping company is getting into mining.

  • Sino-Global shipping announced a new CTO and COO to spearhead the launch of its new bitcoin mining operation. The price of its shares spiked on the announcement, more than doubling at their peak the day the news broke. A press release said the company’s ASICs are sourced from Bitmain. 

• California’s pension fund bought a lot of RIOT shares.

  • California has the largest public pension fund in the US, and they were buying up more shares of Riot Blockchain in Q4 2020 for the first time since 2017. Filings show the pension now holds over 113,000 RIOT shares, up from less than 17,000 prior to Q4. 

• Poolin acquired NovaBlock.

  • Mining pool Poolin bought a North America-based competitor, NovaBlock, and its 1.07 EH/s of hashrate. The hashrate migration is expected to complete this week. Poolin says NovaBlock will continue to operate independently. 

• Bit Digital removes its CEO.

  • Public mining company Bit Digital removed its CEO Min Hu and accepted the resignation of its board director Ping Liu for “health reasons.” An interim CEO has been appointed, but the significant leadership changes come amid an ongoing class-action lawsuit against the company prompted by research questioning the legitimacy of Bit Digital’s business published by J Capital. 

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.

Hashrate Under Management (HUM):  Compass and Hashr8 want to highllight an important metric that helps to clarify who owns what hash power. H.U.M. works to eliminate commonly double-counted hashrate with both mining facilities and mining service companies claimining it. Read more about this metric in our blog post. 

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