Riot Platforms and Bitfarms shine in July as other miners struggle in post-halving revenue squeeze

The first full week of August has come to a close, and publicly traded bitcoin miners have finished releasing their monthly mining updates. 

Miners have been under pressure since April, when the latest bitcoin halving event occurred, and are trying to adjust to slashed revenues.

"Competition abroad will only continue to intensify and it strains credulity that US-listed companies…will be long-term lowcost producers and therefore market share winners in this extremely commodity industry,” short-seller Kerrisdale Capital wrote in a June report.

Bloomberg reported last month that Cipher Mining is exploring a potential sale after receiving takeover interest.

Here’s a look at how the largest miners produced during July:

MARA, formerly known as Marathon Digital, is by far the largest public miner by market cap at around $5 billion. Bitcoin production rose 17% month-over-month to 692 BTC, and its average operational hash rate grew 5% to 27.5 EH/s.

As of July 31, MARA held a total of 20,818 bitcoin and did not sell any in July. The company recently adopted a HODL approach towards its BTC treasury policy and will retain all BTC mined in operations and will periodically make strategic open market purchases of BTC.

CleanSpark mined 494 bitcoin, up about 10% month-over-month, and increased its treasury by 567% compared to the prior-year period. It now holds 7,082 BTC. The average hashrate throughout July was 20.07 EH/s, resulting in an average of 15.94 bitcoin mined daily.

Riot Platforms’ production jumped 45% from June, mining 370 bitcoin last month. Riot also acquired Block Mining, a Kentucky-based bitcoin miner, in a $92.5 million deal.

Core Scientific earned 411 bitcoin in July (down from 430 in June) with a total hash rate of 20.1 EH/s. To support the expansion of the company’s HPC hosting business, bitcoin miners will be migrated from data centers designated for HPC hosting to bitcoin mining data centers. Also, Block, Inc. (formerly Square) and Core Scientific announced an agreement to supply Core Scientific with Block’s new 3-nanometer mining ASICs.

Best of the rest

The following companies all have market caps under $2 billion:

Iris Energy mined 222 BTC in July, lower than both June (233 BTC) and May (230 BTC). Cipher mined 178 BTC and sold 108 BTC, bringing its total BTC held to 2,270. TeraWulf’s monthly production rose 13%  to 155 BTC.

Meanwhile, Hut 8 produced 105 bitcoin, bringing its total lot to 9,102 BTC, and also introduced a new CFO.

Bitfarms, which is still in the midst of a potential takeover from Riot, earned 253 BTC in July, a 34% month-over-month increase. The company said its Bitcoin mined per month has increased 62% since the halving event.