A leading Bitcoin mining firm, Riot Platforms, announced that its Bitcoin stash has now exceeded 10,000, an impressive 37% increase from last year. Despite this growth, the company experienced a 13% dip in Bitcoin production in Aug. 2024 compared to the previous month. This drop happens as Bitcoin mining companies struggle to stay profitable, mainly because energy costs are rising.
Bitcoin’s halving event in April cut mining rewards in half, from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC for every 210,000 blocks. As a result, Bitcoin miners are now exploring data centers to increase their profits. However, operating an AI or high-performance data center costs much more than running a cryptocurrency mining operation.
Riot generated 322 Bitcoin in August, a drop from the 370 produced in July. Additionally, this marks a slight 3% decrease compared to the 333 Bitcoin mined in Aug. 2023. Unlike last year, when Riot sold 300 Bitcoin in August, generating $8.6 million in revenue, the company didn’t sell any Bitcoin this August.
Riot CEO Jason Les said in a statement that Texas typically experiences its highest energy demands in August due to extreme heat, impacting mining operations on the ERCOT grid.
Riot lowers power costs with optimized energy use
According to Les, the company cut energy costs while supplying more power to the grid during peak demand times. As a result, Riot earned power credits in August, bringing the total energy cost at its Rockdale facility in Texas down to $20 per megawatt-hour (MWh).
The company’s Corsicana facility in Texas, which buys energy based on real-time market prices, managed to keep its total power costs at $39 per megawatt-hour for the month. In August, Riot’s average mining speed was 14.5 exahashes per second (EH/s), about 7% lower than July’s rate of 15.5 EH/s.
However, it’s a huge improvement, up 224% from what it was in Aug. 2023. A higher hashrate shows that more computing power is used to verify and add transactions to a cryptocurrency’s blockchain. This added effort strengthens the network’s security, making it harder for anyone to break into the system.
