BT Daily New: Demand for Crypto Mining Rigs Skyrockets in Russia Amid Low Energy Costs
1. Demand for Crypto Mining Rigs Skyrockets in Russia Amid Low Energy Costs
Demand for Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) miners, specialized cryptocurrency mining rigs, has increased significantly in Q4 2022 in Russia, as reported by a local news outlet Kommersant. The surge in demand was driven by low equipment and electricity prices, the report added.The increased interest in ASIC rigs comes despite weaker demand for graphic processing units (GPUs), Kommersant reports. The news agency says sales of Chilkoot, one of the official distributors of crypto mining rigs in Russia, were greater during the first two months of Q4 compared to the entire Q3. Further, during the first nine months of 2022, Chilkoot’s sales were 65% higher than last year.
BitRiver analyst Vladislav Antonov said the Russian industrial market welcomed the latest developments as the price of ASIC mining equipment stands as close as possible to the cost of production. During the period between August and October, mining rig prices plunged by nearly 20%, Chilkoot added. However, prices have not dropped further since October, it added.
Chilkoot CEO Artem Eremin said his company is collaborating with legal entities and noticed that their mining equipment purchases in one transaction increased by 30% compared to the start of the year. He said one of the reasons behind lower GPU prices is Ethereum’s transition from the proof of work (PoW) to the proof of stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.
2. Compass Mining Launches Bitcoin Miner Protection Plan
Compass Mining, a firm that brokers bitcoin mining machines and hosting services primarily to retail clients, said it is offering its first protection product so that customers can safeguard their bitcoin mining machines.Insurance options for miners are severely limited, in part because traditional insurers have had a hard time coming up with plans for the nascent industry. The new "low cost" plans protect in case of fire, theft, government action and electrical damage, said Will Foxley, director of content at Compass and a CoinDesk contributor.
"Bitcoin mining is a burgeoning, young industry. Simple protection products like this should be considered a financial primitive," Jameson Nunney, the company's chief strategy officer, said in the statement.
The newly launched product is available to customers hosted in Texas, South Carolina, Nebraska and Oklahoma partner sites. Compass will expand it to other sites after completing the initial rollout to its core clients.
3. Turning garbage into digital gold: The rise of landfill bitcoin mining
Garbage has some unique advantages as a fuel source that readers should not overlook. For one thing, its abundance opens a massive opportunity for potential hash rate growth as landfill methane capture and plasma gasification infrastructure is installed. And the data cited in the previous section more than corroborates the plentifulness of trash. For another, landfills are globally distributed — trash is everywhere. Similar to the distribution of the Bitcoin network itself, miners can go almost anywhere to turn trash into energy for bitcoin mining. Also, this form of energy is truly stranded and wasted, making miners not just a buyer of last resort for this resource, but also one of the only buyers. Landfill methane reduction by other means is limited.Lastly, and most importantly, bitcoin mining at landfills supercharges the environmentally-friendly narratives around bitcoin mining that counteract seemingly non-stop climate activist criticisms. Some reports label landfills as “super emitters.” Landfills are the world’s third-largest anthropogenic source of methane. And of the trillions of pounds of trash produced each year, some “extremely conservative” estimates suggest barely 33% of that waste is handled in any sort of environmentally-conscious manner.
The stage could not be better set for bitcoin miners to consume literal trash and reduce methane emissions. XcelPlus, for example, flatly states the pollution-reduction advantages of its form of bitcoin mining. According to its website, “The amount of energy consumed by the Bitcoin mining process is vast, expensive and polluting… By funneling waste coal, garbage and other hazardous waste streams through our XcelPlus Plasma gasifier, it can convert 50 tons of waste per day into energy.”
It's not hyperbolic to say this could be game over for environmental criticisms of bitcoin mining.
4. Trader Joe takes its first step into the Ethereum ecosystem
Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Trader Joe has announced its very first expansion from Avalanche and onto the Ethereum ecosystem, as part of its plans to access new markets and drive up user activity.The decentralized trading platform announced its “multi-chain” expansion into Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution Arbitrum One on Dec. 1 and follows around a month after it stated its intention to expand to additional markets and ink new partnerships amid falling TVL and user activity in the third quarter.
The deployment comes as Trader Joe has also expanded its ecosystem through partnerships and integrations with wallets, data clients and other vectors” since the second quarter as a means to spread the exposure of Avalanche and the Trader Joe itself.
Among the most notable recent partnerships include that of Trust Wallet and Crypto.com.
Trader Joe added that the protocol’s original AMM — Joe V1 AMM — would also move onto Arbitrum One in addition to the Liquidity Book AMM, which will bring “zero slippage trades and discretized liquidity provisioning to all Arbinauts.”
As for why Trader Joe chose to deploy its AMMs on Arbitrum One, the team said they were impressed by Offchain Labs’ efforts in building an ecosystem of DeFi protocols on the network, which is indicative of its 53.4% market share in total value locked (TVL) across all Ethereum layer-2 scaling solutions.
“Deploying (the) Liquidity Book will be a great addition to the vibrant ecosystem,” the team added.