Bitcoin miner Riot released its Q2 bitcoin mining and production update on Tuesday, which highlights ongoing capitulation trends in the bitcoin mining industry, but Riot’s capitulation paid for expansion while others simply needed to stay afloat.
Notably, Riot increased its year-over-year (YoY) BTC production by 107%, resulting in the production of 1,395 BTC valued around $34 million at press time, as opposed to last year’s 675 BTC, or roughly $16 million.
Riot’s production can be attributed to its growing miner fleet. The company currently boasts 44,720 application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) BTC miners with a hash rate of 4.4 exahash per second (EH/s), which it will expand to 47,511 ASICs outputting near 4.9 EH/s once all of its recently shipped miners are fully deployed.
However, amid Riot’s growth in both self-mining and hosted facilities driving the company’s hashrate, it still had to sell $14.4 million worth of bitcoin along with dumping an additional 30.6 million shares on the stock market, which raised an additional $267 million. Thus, the company now holds assets valued at $496 million with $270 million of that being cash-on-hand, up from its $113 million cash value in Q1.
Therefore, even though the miner capitulated and sold some of its bitcoin while dumping shares on the market, the company is financially stronger. Additionally, it is worth noting the company still holds a treasury of 6,653 BTC, or nearly $159 million.
Truly, the bitcoin mining industry has traversed dangerous waters during this market downturn. Large-scale miners like Core Scientific and Bitfarms sold more bitcoin than they mined during Q2. Nevertheless, other miners such as Hut 8 and Digithost continue to hodl every bitcoin they produce.