Today, Bitcoin miners have 1.82 million coins at their disposal, which is equivalent to 9.4 percent of the total BTC in circulation. This figure is the lowest in 2023, indicating a willingness on the part of owners of computing equipment to get rid of mined assets as their value increases.

That said, the difficulty of mining Bitcoin is 43.05 T, which is a record figure. Accordingly, mining BTC is now harder than ever.

That said, the BTC network’s hash rate continues to be above 300 hashes per second. During the last month, the figure once exceeded the level of 400 hashes, which was an all-time high.

Despite Bitcoin’s current plunge to $22,000, miners and other BTC holders have not taken to exchanges for panic selling. Moreover, as the chart from Glassnode shows, 5,000 bitcoins worth $110 million have been withdrawn from trading platforms in the last 24 hours.

What’s happening to Bitcoin miners

The total processing power of ASIC miners sold by Canaan during the quarter reaches the 1.9 million terahash per second mark. This figure is down 75.8 percent from the fourth quarter of 2021, indicating a significant change.

As a reminder, Bitcoin reached its current all-time high of $69,000 in November 2021. Although the cryptocurrency experienced a correction before the end of the year, many in the blockchain industry were counting on continued growth and a renewal of coin value records. This, among other things, led them to buy miners to mine digital assets, which were very profitable at the time. However, in retrospect, it turned out that the market peaked then, and 2022 was the year of a prolonged collapse and the collapse of cryptocurrency companies.

According to Cointelegraph’s sources, there is positive news here, as the company’s mining revenue for the year rose 368.2 percent to $10.46 million for the quarter. Canaan CEO Nangeng Zhang commented on this information.

To mitigate demand risks during the market downturn, we have worked hard to improve and grow our mining business. Our efforts brought more success in early 2023 with the launch of equipment with a total hash rate of 3.8 hashes per second. Accordingly, we have made a determined investment in strengthening our production capacity and expanding our mining operations to more diverse geographies that offer advantageous conditions.

Despite its success in this area, Canaan posted a net loss of $63.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2022, compared to a profit of $182 million in the fourth quarter of 2021. Canaan’s chief financial officer Jin Cheng said the loss was due to inventory write-downs and research costs required to launch a new line of ASIC miners. Here’s his cue.

Given the very weak market and low prices, we incurred additional inventory write-down costs of RM205.3 million, which also reduced our gross profit. Combined with the one-off higher research and development costs associated with the launch of our A13 series of ASIC miners, a net loss was generated for the quarter as a whole.

For the full year, the company’s revenue was down only 13.8 per cent to $634.9 million – mainly due to better mining conditions in the first and second quarters of 2022. The company now has $706 million in total assets, compared to $67 million in total liabilities.

It’s worth noting that not everyone in the cryptocurrency mining industry is doing badly. Last week, for example, Riot Platforms announced its financial results for 2022. The company ended up with $259.2 million in revenue, with the giant mining 5,554 bitcoins for the year, which beat its 2021 result by 46 percent. The total hash rate of equipment at Riot’s disposal tripled over the period.

Also reported was an increase in bitcoin mining by employees of Argo Blockchain, a publicly traded mining company. In February 2023, the company mined 162 bitcoins, or approximately 5.78 BTC per day. At the same time, the corresponding figure in January was 5.4 BTC, which means Argo was not prevented even by a 10 percent increase in Bitcoin mining difficulty in late February.


We think the current Bitcoin mining situation is surprising. Still, this bearish trend was the first one, during which the BTC network's hash rate is setting records and miners are actively increasing the amount of their own equipment. Well, as the first cryptocurrency rises in value, mining will bring in more money, we can expect this trend to continue after the next bull run begins.