Bitcoin Miner Maker Expands Market Share
In 2019, Bitcoin (BTC) mining unit manufacturer MicroBT quickly expanded its market share by selling more than half a million units. It chipped away at rival Bitmain’s dominance.
MicroBT sold around 600,000 units of its flagship WhatsMiner M20 series the previous year. The Shenzhen-based firm’s sales head, Vincent Zhang, stated this in an online panel hosted by Poolin, a Chinese mining pool, on Thursday in a WeChat group.
In addition to that, these products produce a computing power of around 60 terahashes per second (TH/s) on average. And this indicates that the newly delivered 600,000 units might have contributed more than 30 exahashes (EH/s) of hashing power to the BTC network in 2019.
During Bitcoin’s price surge in 2019, the network’s two-week average computing power doubled. It grew from 40 EH/s around the end of 2018 to almost 100 EH/s in December. And that means nearly half of Bitcoin’s computing power growth in 2019 might come from equipment brought by MicroBT.
But Zhang did not give the exact average unit price of these batches. And this is because they might fluctuate depending on BTC’s price during the year. The company generally priced different models in its M20 product line between $24 to $30 per terahashes. This suggests that the firm has delivered a nine-figure revenue in U.S. dollars for the year 2019.
The current computing power of Bitcoin stands at 110 EH/s. And this indicates MicroBT might account for about 30 percent of BTC mining power sold right now. As a result, it makes one of the largest and fast-growing miner makers in the world.
The Power
Meanwhile, cryptocurrency research company Coinshares estimated in a report Bitmain’s dominance of sold Bitcoin hash rate was approximately 65 percent. And it was down from 75 percent in 2018.
However, these digits might become slightly outdated as BTC’s computing power has since then improved by another 20 percent. It jumped from 92 Eh/s in mid-December to around 110 EH/s at the moment.
The maker of Avalon miner, Hangzhou-based Canaan Creative, went to the U.S. in November. And it estimated in its IPO filing it accounted for about 20 percent of Bitcoin computing power sold for the first half of 2019. The company has yet to release its full-year results.
With that, Bitmain’s mining equipment still dominates the market. And it resulted from the successful sales of its AntMiner S7 from 2015 to 2016 and its S9 model from 2017 to 2018.
Based on Bitmain’s IPO filing in September 2018 in Hong Kong, the firm brought around 500,000 Bitcoin miners in 2015 and 2016. Then, it further sold 3 million units from the start of 2017 to June 30, 2018. This happened amid the crypto market’s bull run.
On the other hand, with an average of 14 TH/s computing power, S9 remains the most widely used miner. But they are experiencing a growing risk of becoming obsolete as Bitcoin’s halving event approaches in May. It may diminish BTC’s mining rewards from 12.5 BTC per block to 6.25.
