Bitcoin (BTC) mining was more profitable in June than May as the price of the cryptocurrency rose 2% and the network hashrate dropped by 5%, and as the market adjusted to the effects of the halving, investment bank Jefferies said in a research report on Monday.
“June was a month of modest recovery from the immediate impacts of the halving that were most pronounced in May,” analyst Jonathan Petersen wrote.
Hashrate refers to the total combined computational power used to mine and process transactions on a proof-of-work blockchain and is a proxy for competition in the industry and mining difficulty. The quadrennial reward halving, which occurred in April, slowed the rate of growth in bitcoin supply as miners' rewards were cut by 50%.
Jefferies cut its price target for hold-rated Marathon Digital (MARA) to $22 from $24. The bank also reduced its price target on Argo Blockchain ADRs (ARBK) to $1.20 from $1.50 and on the U.K. traded shares (ARB) to 9.5p (12 cents) from 11.90p. It maintained its hold rating on the company. One ADR is equivalent to 10 shares.
The bank noted that a number of bitcoin miners have pivoted towards to high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) hosting to diversify their revenue and capitalize on surging demand for AI and cloud computing infrastructure.
“This strategic shift has been driven by the declining profitability of bitcoin mining, particularly after the recent halving events,” Petersen wrote.
U.S.-listed mining companies produced a greater share of new bitcoin in June than May, the bank said, increasing to 20.8% of the total network versus 19.1% the month before as they brought on new capacity and the network hashrate dropped.
Marathon mined the most bitcoin in June, 590, though that was 4% fewer than in May. CleanSpark (CLSK) mined 445 tokens, an increase of 7%, the report said. Marathon’s installed hashrate remained the largest of the U.S. listed miners, at 31.5 exahashes per second (EH/S) with Riot Platforms (RIOT) second with 22 EH/s, the report added.
Read more: Private Equity Giants Are Circling Bitcoin Miners on AI Allure
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