Bitcoin miners collected $1.5 billion in revenue in March, a monthly record for the 12-year-old blockchain network, as the price of bitcoin (BTC) broke above $50,000.
- “Few had anticipated the scale of this bull run in September 2020. Back then, the monthly miner revenue sat at $329 million. Since then, the revenues have increased by 373%,” according to a new report by Arcane Research, a Norwegian analysis firm.
- Miners are awarded bitcoin whenever they add a new block of transactions to the blockchain, which they can later sell on the market to fund operating costs or simply just to cash out. Transaction fees are another source of revenue.
- “The recent mining revenue spike is rewarding miners who already had a well-established setup before the bitcoin bull run, or great foresight in Q3 2020.”
- New mining equipment is estimated to be delivered around November 2021 and January 2022, which could contribute to greater computational power (hashrate) used to mine and process transactions, according to Arcane.
- Publicly listed mining stocks have largely tracked the price of bitcoin in March. RIOT Blockchain, a bitcoin mining company (NASDAQ: RIOT), is up about 23% versus BTC’s rise of 26% for the month to date at the time of writing.
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