In the last episode of the Mining Report, The Block's Wolfie Zhao discussed the unprecedented growth of North American bitcoin mining companies in 2021 with massive equipment pre-orders and power capacity build-outs.

Over the past few months, there have been several interesting developments in the crypto mining industry. The prices of graphic unit processors, commonly used for mining on Ethereum and other proof-of-working networks, have continued to slump, thanks in part to the overall crypto market downturn. Although Ethereum's hashrate remains steadily at the 1,000 TH/s level, its growth has largely slowed amid anticipation the switch to proof-of-stake will take place later this year.

In the bitcoin ASIC arena, Canaan, Bitmain and MicroBT have all rolled out liquid-cooled miners, bringing changes to the market where air-cooling has been the dominant and default setting since the start of the bitcoin ASIC era. It is a sign that bitcoin's mining chip efficiency growth is starting to plateau while equipment designers and manufacturers increase their efforts on other hardware engineering solutions to maximize mining chip performance. 

Meanwhile, with the massive expansion plans executed in 2021, mining companies face mounting pressure for cash in 2022. Some long-time mining hodlers, who choose not to sell mined bitcoins to cover OpEx or CapEx, have finally started to offload parts of their bitcoin reserves. On the other hand, the demand for private loans in bitcoin mining appears to continue.

In this episode of The Scoop Mining Report, The Block Research's mining analyst Wolfie Zhao and host Frank Chaparro take a further look at the changing dynamics in the mining hardware and financing space.

Episode 34 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Research Mining Analyst Wolfie Zhao.

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This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross River

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About Cross River

Cross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto