Fans used to cool Bitcoin data miners are hooked up on the miners during construction of a Bitcoin data center in Virginia Beach, Va., Friday, Feb. 9, 2018. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
Bitcoin miners have transferred their coins to exchanges in mass numbers as the value of the world’s largest cryptocurrency continues to decrease.
According to Bloomberg, miners transferred nearly 195,663 coins to exchanges, marking the largest monthly increase since January.
“This is really the miners trying to keep up their operations as things are kind of in a crypto winter for prices,” Bloomberg’s Global Markets Editor Joanna Ossinger said in an interview. So we’re seeing miners move their tokens from their wallets onto exchanges. That’s not a perfect indicator of sales but it represents something showing that they are at least looking to sell, if not selling in order to maintain operations and pay for machines that they might have bought months ago.”
Will Foxley, the director of content at mining hardware marketplace and hosting services provider Compass Mining, agreed with Ossinger.
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“I think miners are just talking about the macro environment and think it is probably prudent to sell Bitcoin in these levels in order to keep the operations safe,” Foxley told Bloomberg.
Bitcoin’s current price averaged $32,000 in May, which is less than half of the $64,000 value it peaked at in 2021. Bitcoin also experienced a 35 percent price drop in 2022.
Bitcoin miners “are really not doing that well,” Ossinger said. Among the companies feeling the brunt of the economic downturn are Riot Blockchain, CelanSpark and Cathedra Bitcoin to name a few.
Cathedra CEO AJ Scalia said the company has taken precautions to weather what JPMorgan Chief Jamie Dimon called an economic “hurricane.”
“We have spent the last several weeks restructuring our balance sheet and operations to ensure Cathedra is well-positioned to endure a prolonged economic downturn,” Scalia said in a statement.
PHOTO: Fans used to cool Bitcoin data miners are hooked up on the miners during construction of a Bitcoin data center in Virginia Beach, Va., Friday, Feb. 9, 2018. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
