Hive Earned 184 BTC From Curtailing Its Power Use in December — That's Almost As Much As it Mined

Canadian bitcoin miner Hive Blockchain (HIVE) earned about 184 BTC ($3.1 million) by curtailing its power use in December whereas it mined the equivalent of 213.8 BTC.

Miners have been curtailing their power use at times of high demand for energy, selling the electricity back to the grid, in order to cope with market headwinds that have seen some of the biggest names in the industry filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Hive uses a mix of computers purpose-built for bitcoin mining, known as application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), and general purpose graphics processing units (GPUs), to mine other tokens. The miner converts the alt-coins to bitcoin after mining them.

Hive's production was down about 20%, or 50 BTC, month-on-month. But the difference was more than made up by Hive's grid balancing activities, according to its December update, released on Monday.

Hive stock was up 2.2% on pre-market trading on the day, along with the broader crypto market.

The mining company also deployed the first machines that it has designed itself using Intel's (INTC) Blocksale chips. Hive installed 1,423 of the so-called Buzzminers, whereas all 5,800, totalling 620 petahash/second (PH/s) of computing power, will be shipped by the end of January, Hive said.

All in all, Hive mined the equivalent of 4,752 BTC throughout 2022, up 18% compared to the previous year.

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