Bitcoin miners reported a drop in monthly production as mining difficulty — the computational power required to confirm BTC transactions and mine new blocks — continued to increase.
Bitcoin production for prominent Bitcoin (BTC) miners, including Hut 8, Mara and Bitrfarms, saw a dip in January compared with the last month of 2024. In contrast, Riot Platforms recorded a 2.1% increase in Bitcoin production, bucking the trend.
Source: Riot Platforms
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Preparing for rising network difficulty
Throughout January, the difficulty of the Bitcoin network ranged around its all-time high value of 110 trillion (T).
The difficulty in producing new blocks has increased by 27.8% since the last halving event on April 20, 2024. Foreseeing this need for increased computation power, Bitcoin miners have been upgrading their equipment and streamlining business operations to remain profitable.
Compared to December 2024, Hut 8’s monthly Bitcoin production dropped 27% as it mined 65 BTC in January. Similarly, Mara and Bitfarms recorded a 12.5% and 4.7% decrease in monthly Bitcoin production, respectively.
Bitfarms monthly Bitcoin production. Source: Bitfarms
Riot maintains Bitcoin production with new facility
Riot Platforms commissioned a new mining facility in Texas in January to initiate a large-scale, 1 gigawatt development for Bitcoin mining. In an announcement, Jason Les, CEO of Riot, said:
“The Corsicana Facility reached a deployed hash rate of 15.7 EH/s towards the end of the month. We also continue to see strong results from newly deployed miners and immersion systems reflected in the significant improvement in our operational hash rate and utilization rates.”
Meanwhile, Asher Genoot, CEO of Hut 8, announced the near completion of infrastructure upgrades. that should improve its overall mining capacity “in the coming weeks.”
On the other hand, the Bitcoin mining hashrate is expected to decline due to a reduction in mining difficulty and fewer preorders for mining hardware.
Mining difficulty fell to 108 T in the last week of January, while maintaining a hashrate of approximately 832 exahashes per second (EH/s).
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