Bit Digital Migrates All Its Bitcoin Mining Out of China Amid Ban

The New York-based miner expects to increase its mining power to 2.6 EH/s by mid-2022.

AccessTimeIconNov 17, 2021 at 2:37 p.m. UTC
Updated May 11, 2023 at 4:00 p.m. UTC

North American dominance in bitcoin mining continues to strengthen as most miners continue their migration out of China since the country’s sweeping ban on all crypto-linked activities in July.

Most recently, bitcoin miner Bit Digital said Wednesday it has moved all of its mining rigs to North America.

“Our mining assets are now entirely out of China and 100% in North America,” said Bit Digital’s CEO Bryan Bullett in a statement. “We believe the shift in global hash distribution will result in a stronger bitcoin network, with the majority of hash now located here in North America,” he added.

In fact, according to a Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance study published in October, the U.S. accounted for about 35% of the total bitcoin mining hashrate, or computing power, while Canada contributed almost 10%, setting up North America as the dominant region for bitcoin mining following China’s moves.

Bit Digital said it owned 27,744 mining rigs with a total hashrate of 1.6 exahash per second (EH/S), as of Sept. 30. This was a decline from 32,500 miners and 1.915 EH/s of mining power as of June 30 because it sold and disposed of some of its mining computers during the migration.

However, the miner said the majority of its recently closed $80 million equity placement was used to buy 10,000 new Bitmain miners. Most of these new computers have been installed and the rest will be online through June 2022, raising the miner’s computing power to about 2.6 EH/s.

The current hashrate of the total Bitcoin network is about 133 EH/s as of Oct. 16, according to data analytics firm Glassnode.

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Aoyon Ashraf

Aoyon Ashraf is managing editor with more than a decade of experience in covering equity markets