The cryptocurrency mining space continues to see demand for mining machines, as Canaan, one of the world’s largest Bitcoin mining rig makers, has secured a sizable purchase deal with Genesis Digital Assets.
China-based Canaan has received an order from Genesis, one of the world’s earliest Bitcoin mining companies, for 20,000 of its Bitcoin mining machines to fuel the growth of Genesis’s operation in North America and the Nordics, according to a company statement released Tuesday.
If the number of machines turn out to be insufficient, Canaan has also granted Genesis an option to purchase up to 180,000 additional mining machines. Genesis is a decentralized company with no primary headquarters, but its main mining farms are in North American and the Nordic region.
The new order came after Genesis in June bought 10,000 machines from Canaan, as part of the duo’s long-term partnership. In July, it announced that it had raised US$125 million in equity funding to support its expansion plans.
“The Bitcoin mining machines from this latest purchase order are part of our ongoing efforts to rapidly scale our Bitcoin mining operations in North America and the Nordics where we are focused on energy that comes from renewable sources,” Abdumalik Mirakhmedov, a co-founder and executive chairman of Genesis, said in the statement, adding that the new machines are set to increase its capacity “as we work towards our goal to increase our capacity to 1.4 gigawatts by the end of 2023.”
As of August 2021, Genesis took up just over 2.4% of the global Bitcoin hashrate, with its data center capacity amounting to over 170 megawatts, which could translate into total hashrate exceeding 3.1 exahashes per second, according to the statement.
Meanwhile, Canaan is boosting its mining sales, with more new orders placed. Last month, Mawson Infrastructure Group, an Australian cryptocurrency mining company, purchased an additional 17,352 ASIC Bitcoin mining machines from Canaan in a move to bolster its mining operations on its home turf and in the United States, the company said in a statement.
Also last month, Canaan received an order for 4,000 Bitcoin mining machines — with an aggregate operating hash power of 272 petahash per second — from HIVE Blockchain Technologies, a crypto mining company headquartered in Vancouver, according to a company statement. They are expected to add to HIVE’s previous order with Canaan for 6,400 machines with a total operating hash power of 574 PH/s, the statement showed.
Other mining companies are also betting big on crypto mining. Hong Kong-headquartered crypto miner BIT Mining — a New York Stock Exchange-listed company that only months ago became a big investor in Chinese cryptocurrency mining — said last month that it had “completed the transition of its business to an enterprise that covers cryptocurrency mining, data center operation and mining pool.”
In the second quarter of the year, BIT Mining recorded 2.87 billion yuan (US$445.1 million) of net revenue, a huge leap from just 19.6 million yuan in the previous quarter and 3.6 million yuan in the same period of last year, according to its latest quarterly report.
However, it booked a net loss of 97.9 million yuan in the second quarter of this year, compared to a net income of 13.2 million yuan in the first quarter and a net loss of 86.3 million yuan in the second quarter of last year.
As China continues cracking down on crypto mining, many miners have fled China for other places that appear to be more regulation-friendly and offer inexpensive power. Some of the top destinations for displaced Chinese miners have included North America, Kazakhstan and Northern Europe.
Texas has also emerged as a new promised land. Poolin, a major mining pool with significant operations in China, has been actively moving its mining operation from China to the United States, with efforts to relocate some of its executives to Austin, Texas — a state that is emerging to be a friendly destination for crypto mining.