The downturn in the cryptocurrency market has left some miners struggling to afford their expensive equipment and mining costs.
Bitmain’s Antminer S19 and S19 Pro have fallen to their lowest prices since 2020 at around $26- $36 per Terahash, according to market data on dedicated integrated circuit (ASIC) mining machines traded by Luxor.
According to Luxor’s Bitcoin ASIC price index, these include: Antminer S19, S19 Pro, Whatsminer M30…
The latest average price for a similarly sized miner (with an efficiency of less than 38 joules per TH) was around $41 per TH, but at the end of last year it was as high as $106 per TH, a drop of more than 60%.
And the $20+ /TH level hasn’t been seen since the price bottomed out in 2020.
Celsius also contributed to the bear market price decline, as Celsius and its Mining arm Celsius Mining filed for bankruptcy protection this week, Coindesk reported earlier today.
Celsius Mining auctioned off thousands of its newly purchased mining machines in June, according to a person familiar with the matter:
The first batch (6000 units) was sold at $28 /TH and the second batch (5000 units) changed hands at $22 /TH. According to the price index data, mining machines were trading at about $50-60 /TH at that time.
Celsius Mining has invested a total of $500 million in its North American bitcoin mining business in the past year and reportedly has around 22,000 ASIC mining machines, most of which are BitMain’s latest generation AntMiner S19 series;
Celsius’s chief executive Alex Mashinsky reneged on his promise not to siphon off customers’ savings when a Financial Times journalist accused the company of funding its mining operations.
Ethan Vera, Luxor’s chief operating officer, earlier warned: “As more mining machines enter the market, we expect the price of new generation equipment to drop by $1-2 /TH. There are a number of mining companies that will need to liquidate some of their equipment, which will put additional pressure on ASIC prices.”
CleanSpark buys nearly 3,000 miners a month But despite the downturn, companies are choosing to invest more at the low end.
Bitcoin mining and energy technology company Cleansparkrecently acquired a large number of 1,061 Whatsminer M30S machines to mine bitcoin in Coinmint’s renewable energy escrow facility at a steep discount, according to a press release from the company on Thursday.
At one stroke, it adds about 93petahashes per second (PH/s) of computing power to the company’s existing mining capacity.
Zach Bradford, CEO of CleanSpark, said: “Our proven hybrid approach of combining our devices while expanding our own mining facilities puts us in a good position to continuously increase our Bitcoin mining capabilities.
In fact, this is the company’s second major purchase of machinery in about a month.
CleanSpark was also awarded a contract to purchase 1,800 Antminer S19 XP Bitcoin mining machines at a low price in June during the market downturn.
Bradford said the company’s computing power has grown 47 percent over the past six months, and monthly bitcoin production has grown 50 percent over the same period.
These important KPIs highlight the fact that we are growing faster than global computing power…
We believe that an operational strategy focused on efficiency, uptime, and execution will lead to continuous improvement in these metrics.