Two years after China’s crackdown on bitcoin mining, miners find new low-carbon opportunities

China was once the world's biggest crypto mining hub, accounting for over 70% of the total “hash rate” — or processing power — of the bitcoin network, and Chinese miners almost led all the bitcoin production in the industry. However, after cryptocurrency mining was banned in China in 2021, almost all of China’s hashrate disappeared overnight. The mining farms have moved to other regions such as Kazakhstan, Russia, Malaysia, North Europe, and the Americas. For just two years, bitcoin hashrate landscape has been reshaped. Based on data provided by World Population Review, the hash rates of the leading countries in Bitcoin mining as of 2023 are as follows:

The United States: 35.4%

Kazakhstan: 18.1%

Russia: 11.23%

Canada: 9.55%

Ireland: 4.68%

Malaysia: 4.58%

Germany: 4.48%

Iran: 3.1%

China used to be the home base of miners, but now this has become a past in bitcoin mining development.

Chinese authorities banned cryptocurrency mining, causing many miners to move overseas. As a Malaysian investor in cryptocurrency, Yannis has benefited a lot from the trend. (Yannis is his pseudonym name instead of the real name of the interviewee for privacy reasons.) Since the end of 2021, Yannis has received a lot of orders for custody services, so he set up another two large-scale mining farms in Malaysia to accommodate the transferred demands.

As an experienced player who went through many rounds of crypto market cycles, Yannis has witnessed the growth and transformation of POW mining. But until now, bitcoin mining is still facing problems such as massive energy consumption and pollution. Several months before China's sweeping ban on cryptocurrency mining, the electric vehicle maker Tesla announced that it would no longer accept bitcoin for car purchases, citing environmental concerns. After that, ETH, the second largest crypto asset, also announced that it would give up POW mining.

Learning from the experience, Yannis reexamined the sustainability of POW and discovered new opportunities after a long exploration.

In the suburb of Malaysia’s capital city, Kuala Lumpur, Yannis has invested in a brand-new energy-saving mining farm, which takes up over 20,000 square feet, and it has been put into operation at the beginning of this year. This mining farm is specially designed for diminutive and energy-efficient mining rigs. With full capacity, the mining farm can host over 50,000 mining devices, with rooms for FIL, STT, and other mining rigs and for data servers already deployed.

According to Yannis, the company’s previous focus was offering services to FIL miners and private businesses. However, by the second half of the year, it received many orders for the custody of Statter mining rigs, which were a kind of small-scale rigs to mine STT coins. After an investigation of the project, Yannis decided to accept these orders and upgrade the mining farm immediately. Currently, STT mining rigs make up over 50% of the farm’s total mining rigs, and the percentage is still increasing.

Statter Network is a metaverse project. Its main network adopts the SPoW mining mechanism, which is as safe as POW but it can also efficiently avoids POW’s hashrate competition. By enabling the development of smaller, convenient, quieter and more energy-efficient mining rigs, the SPoW mechanism perfectly solve the problems for miners.

Currently, most of the Statter mining rigs deployed at the site are developed by HashMax high-tech company in Florida, the United States. “This is the ideal mining solution that I am looking for,” Yannis said. In the future, low-carbon mining will definitely become the mainstream instrument of cryptocurrency. Along with lower energy-consumption, it also promotes friendly cooperation with the government. The mining farm in Malaysia has sufficient capacity to provide services to Statter miners and meet their other demands. Meanwhile, the farm is open daily for general business visits, and welcomes more low-carbon and greener projects to come.

Although Yannis’ mining farm has deployed a large number of Statter mining rigs, they only account for a small portion of all the mining rigs in the Statter Network. Most Statter nodes on the network are small-scale mining rigs for home PCs distributed around the globe.

Yannis thinks that the popularity of Statter Network has less to do with its eco-friendly and low-carbon strategy than it does with other factors. Following a thorough investigation, the appraiser also compliments Statter Network’s choice of track and its multiple advantages, including the metaverse, artificial intelligence, high-speed smart contract platform, drag-and-drop technological innovation, global community consensus, Wall Street Web3 capital support and cooperation with global top sports IP Maradona. A number of factors boost global investors’ confidence to purchase STT mining rigs, which increases the revenues of Yannis’ mining farm substantially.

Yannis is not the only one who sniffed out the great business opportunity in low-carbon mining. Other investors from South Korea, Argentina, Canada, and oil producing countries in Middle East also plan to build low-carbon and energy-efficient mining farms. These investors with deep pockets will become potential competitors of Yannis. The year of bitcoin halving is usually the bull year. If the bull market arrives next year, then time is the most valuable resource for now. Yannis feels pressed for time. He and other partners step up the construction of more energy-efficient mining farms to satisfy the growing demands for low-carbon mining. He has also bought multiple items, which includes Statter mining rigs to mine for bitcoins by himself. He wants to participate deeper in low-carbon mining to increase the market share when other competitors also act in the same way. All of them bet on this bull market.