According to the mining giant F2Pool, the recent drop in the price of Bitcoin (BTC) to below $54,000 has created a challenging environment for cryptocurrency miners, with only 6 mining rigs remaining profitable.
This situation is putting significant stress on miners, who are forced to continuously sell their Bitcoin holdings to sustain their operations, especially during market downturns.
At an electricity price of $0.08 per kilowatt-hour, ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) machines with an efficiency of below 23 watts per terahash (W/T) are now operating at a loss, according to data published by F2Pool on Friday.
The data also shows that only four Antminer machines, one from Avalon, and one from Whatsminer remain profitable, while Bitcoin prices are below $56,800.
All other mining platforms currently have higher operating costs than the rewards they generate, as the price of Bitcoin hovers around $54,500 at the time of writing.
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Miners, who provide the computational power needed for blockchains in exchange for token rewards, are faced with high operating expenses that continuously force them to sell these rewards.