The Bitcoin miner maker, MicroBT after selling over half a million unit of its miners in 2019 is threatening the dominance of its rival, Bitmain.
The miner sales head, Vincent Zhang, said in a WeChat group that microBT, the Shenzhen-based company, sold 600,000 units of its flagship WhatsMiner M20 series.
“These products generate a computing power of about 60 terahashes per second (TH/s) on average,” he said.
This means the newly delivered 600,000 units may have contributed over 30 exahashes (EH/s) of hashing power to the bitcoin network in 2019. (1 EH = 1 million TH).
While Bitcoin price jumped throughout 2019, the the network computing power jumped from around 40 EH/s in December 2018 to 100 EH/s in December 2019. This shows that it was possible that more than half of the computing power growth of the network might have been as a result of new mining equipment delivered by microBT.
Considering that Bitcoin computing power is currently at 110 EH/s, there’s a 30 percent stake of the total mining power coming from microBT. This makes it one of the largest Bitcoin miner makers in the world currently.
Coinshares, a crypto research firm noted that Bitmain market dominance of sold Bitcoin hash rate was about 65 percent in December 2019. It appears that this might be outdated because Bitcoin has since grown about 20 percent. Moving from 92 EH/s in mid December to about 110 EH/s in current mining power.
Although, it’s true that Bitmain mining equipments are still widely used, Bitmain latest AntMiner S17 series hasn’t been able to rival MicroBT’s WhatsMiner M20 in terms of mass production and shipments.
Additionally, the Coronavirus have caused Bitmain market to stagnate, due to manufacturing and logistics issues, Zhang noted in the WeChat group that microBT has resumed production.
“Currently, part of the logistics has also gone back to work. … So now the supply of miners is not a big issue but not every mining farm is physically accessible,” he said.
He added that investment may be affected as investors can’t access facilities.
“Large scale of investments may be affected because investors may not be able to do physical due diligence on facilities”
