China expanded the ongoing crypto crackdown today. This includes enhancing enforcement against illegal mining, as well as prohibiting all financial transactions involving crypto. The central bank also announced that any trading, order matching, token issuance and derivatives on cryptocurrencies are illegal, including services offered by overseas entities made available within mainland China. The bank explicitly excluded the digital yuan (eCNY) from this list, while naming Bitcoin and Ethereum as examples of banned tokens.
This action is consistent with our assessment that China’s motivations are enforcement of capital controls, and control more generally. …
Bitcoin dropped ~8% overnight on a broad market selloff, following a 4.9% week-on-week (WoW) gain to midnight UTC on 9/19. Overnight fears of contagion spreading from Evergrande in China, as well as the Fed meeting, debt ceiling and increasing focus on a “fiscal taper” ahead of the Fed taper are causing a global selloff in risk markets — US equities are down 1.5% with tech leading the selloff, while Europe is down 1–2%, Asia is mostly down, and commodities are down, with the notable exceptions of gold and natural gas. Treasury yields are down as well, while high yield widened…
BitOoda is pleased to publish our 2021 year-end Bitcoin Hashpower estimates. Please click here to access the report, 2021 Year End Bitcoin Hashpower Estimates: Raising to 198 EH/s; Updating Cost Curve, Mining Costs and Mining Reserve Estimates.
A key factor determining investment returns from Bitcoin mining is an estimate of future Hashrate and difficulty, and their impact on miner revenue in BTC terms. Revenue in USD terms leads to realized Hashrate, which drives investment payback periods and profitability.
With this report, we raise our year end 2021 Hashrate estimate to 198EH/s (from 145 EH/s in July 2021) as capacity appears…
BitOoda is pleased to launch the latest research offering for our subscribers: Crypto Top 20 Analytics. Initially published 4 days per week (Tue-Fri), this report reviews the daily returns for the top 20 tokens of the crypto market, volatility and dominance metrics on BTC and ETH, analytics on the crypto market cap, 30- and 90-day performance, correlation across markets, and technicals.
We are posting this new report as a sample of research available to BitOoda’s paid research subscribers. Premium subscribers also get direct access to the research team. Non-paid subscribers receive limited research with a delay of several days (or…
Bitcoin dropped 10.8% week-on-week (WoW), settling at $46,180 as of midnight UTC on 9/12. As of this morning, spot dropped further to around $44,000. News flow in the space continues to accelerate, with institutional growth underscored by plans for Coinbase to raise $1.5 billion in a private offering, and Fidelity Digital Assets to raise headcount by as much as 70% by year end. Meanwhile, fund flows into the space remain positive, according to Coinshares data, with Bitcoin and Ethereum representing the bulk of YTD inflows.
El Salvador, which recently made Bitcoin legal tender, continues to expand its crypto friendly regime…
Bitcoin dropped 5.1% week-on-week (WoW), settling at $46,187 as of midnight UTC on 9/8. Price had steadily climbed, showing strength beyond $50,000 for a few days before this dip. There appears to be a bit of sell-the-news going on, with an initial catalyst being El Salvador’s adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender.
This was followed by news that the SEC has delivered a Wells notice to Coinbase. Our past experiences with Wells notices in our equity research coverage universe suggest that at minimum this may prove a distraction for management that could take several quarters to resolve. More broadly, this…
Bitcoin fell 0.8% week-on-week (WoW), settling at $48,948 as of midnight UTC on 8/29. Price has remained in the upper $40,000’s for a week after breaking $50,000 briefly last Monday. Wednesday’s difficulty reset took the target Hashrate to 126 EH/s, up ~13% over the prior epoch. Observed Hashrate is currently at 125 EH/s, although we continue to expect an upward reset next week of 2–5%.
Total BTC earnings per PH/s are ~7.2 mBTC, down from ~8.18 mBTC / PH/s last week on the higher target Hashrate and lower Tx fees (1mBTC or milliBTC = 1/1000 BTC). Daily earnings still remain…
Bitcoin rose 4.6% week-on-week (WoW), settling at $49,363 as of midnight UTC on 8/22. Price broke $50,000 this morning amid PayPal’s announcement of plans to allow U.K users to buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrencies. Observed Hashrate suggests the next difficulty reset on Wednesday 8/25 will likely be ~+12–14%. Miners continue to bring rigs online as Chinese miners redeploy out of China and other planned expansions progress. Power infrastructure remains the bottleneck to expansion over the next 6–7 quarters, during which period Hashrate — while increasing — is expected to remain below the prior growth trajectory. …
Friday’s difficulty reset took the target Hashrate to 111 EH/s, up ~7% over the prior epoch. Observed Hashrate continues to recover, and is currently at 134 EH/s. The rapid recovery can be attributed to Chinese miners finding sites to deploy their rigs and ongoing expansion by other miners. This reinforces upside risk to our Hashrate estimates, though the long lead times on the power infrastructure suggest it should still take ~10 quarters for network Hashrate to converge back to our original forecasts — with better miner economics in the interim.
Bitcoin gained 6.6% week-on-week (WoW), settling at $47,074 as of…
Saturday’s difficulty reset took target Hashrate to 104 EH/s, up 6% over the prior period. Observed Hashrate appears to have stabilized after the declines related to the Chinese mining ban. Our current year-end target Hashrate estimate is ~145EH/s (see here), with an upward bias if electrical infrastructure bottlenecks prove more transient than our model currently indicates.
The market has shifted from being semiconductor constrained to being power / infrastructure constrained. Given the long lead times on the power infrastructure side, we assess it will take several quarters for the infrastructure deployment to be complete. As a result, there is a…
