Cryptocurrency mining company Hive Blockchain said this week it had begun to deploy 5800 Intel Blockscale accelerator-based BuzzMiner mining systems that it designed itself. To date, this is the first large-scale deployment of Intel-powered mining machines. Also, the company disclosed that it earned $3.15 million in December by lowering its power use and, therefore, the number of Bitcoins it mined, reports CoinDesk.
Hive constantly optimizes its hardware to improve efficiency and lower power consumption. Late last year, the company ordered the production of 5800 Hive BuzzMiners — cryptocurrency mining machines that it designed itself based on Intel’s Blockscale custom ASICs. So far, the company has received and installed 1423 of these machines and shipped 987 systems to Sweden, where they will be installed by January 15. The remaining systems will be tested and shipped by the end of the month. In addition, Hive plans to replace older ASIC and GPU-powered mining hardware with its own BuzzMiner machines. Meanwhile, Hive appears to be the largest buyer of Intel’s Blockscale chips.
Also, the company recently procured 3570 Bitmain S19j Pro miners, 2050 of which have been installed already.
Hive mined 213.8 Bitcoin in December using ASIC and GPU hardware, which equaled 113.2 Bitcoin Per Exahash. Meanwhile, the cryptocurrency mining company earned $3.15 million in income from its energy price hedging and grid balancing strategy. It essentially means that it did not mine when the demand for energy was high. Instead, it sold electricity back to the grid.
An interesting fact is that Hive’s production was down by about 20% month-over-month in December. Meanwhile, the company’s grid balancing strategy and selling electricity back to the grid more than offset declines in cryptocurrency mining.
Cryptocurrency mining got significantly less profitable in recent quarters due to lower demand for Bitcoins and because it got harder to mine cryptocurrency, which is why Hive and its rivals must improve their efficiency to stay in business.
“Our technical team has updated our software stack which monitors the vital statistics of our global fleet of ASIC miners,” said Aydin Kilic, president & COO of Hive. “This allows us to have great insight and granularity into the performance of each machine, using bespoke API calls, as we carefully study the overall fleet efficiency (in Joules per Terahash), to ensure we are mining for maximum profitability during a Bitcoin bear market. We continue to strive for excellence, ensuring that as we scale our hashrate we also optimize our uptime, to ensure ideal Bitcoin output figures and leading the sector in performance.”
