2020-3-19 17:28 |
Over the past two weeks, investors have been aggressively making an exit from the risky assets and seeking safety to cash-like assets as Covid-19 concerns push the global economy towards recession. Nations across the world have declared national emergencies and instituted lockdowns.
As investors jumped into cash and US bonds, digital currency prices also took a beating. Last week, Bitcoin had one of its largest sell-off in history. This had the trading volume to surge near record highs. This decline in the price of the leading cryptocurrency follows a similar trajectory as other assets like US equities which posted their second-worst daily decline in history.
Bitcoin prices along with risky assets worldwide have been declining over the past month but despite that, on March 1st, the hash rate of the bitcoin network made a new all-time high.
A rising hash rate indicates that miners are increasing mining resources dedicated to the network.
Source: TradeblockThe break-even points of bitcoin mining operators change as cost drivers change that includes changes in the network difficulty, which has been rising alongside the hash rate ever since December 2018. This resulted in increasing the break-even points.
According to TradeBlock, throughout January and February, Bitcoin miners were operating at “healthy” profit margins, meaning the break-even point was below the market price of bitcoin.
However, as miner break-even points remained near highs while the bitcoin price fell sharply, it put miners into a loss.
Source: GlassnodeAs miners are mining bitcoin on negative profit margins, the hash rate has declined nearly 40% from its ATH. Given the deep decline of BTC price, the hash rate is expected to see even a larger drop as miners reduce resources dedicated to the network.
“Due to the declining BTC price, it is now unprofitable for many miners to continue their operations,” noted crypto analysis company Glassnode.
“Since its peak on March 7th, the 7DMA of Bitcoin's hashrate has fallen by ~16% – with hashing power disappearing even faster after the drop to $5k.”
As the hash rate declines, the mining break-even points will also fall, allowing minors to see healthier margins. Also, bitcoin price is seeing a spike as well, jumping past $5,800 today.
Bitcoin (BTC) Live Price 1 BTC/USD =$6,011.4690 change ~ 12.40%Coin Market Cap
$109.88 Billion24 Hour Volume
$4.27 Trillion24 Hour VWAP
$5.55 K24 Hour Change
$745.1990 var single_widget_subscription = single_widget_subscription || []; single_widget_subscription.push("5~CCCAGG~BTC~USD");Similar to Notcoin - Blum - Airdrops In 2024