Top cryptocurrency miner Core Scientific Inc. sold the majority of its Bitcoin holdings in June as the price of digital assets plunged, putting financial pressure on even the industry’s biggest players.
According to the company’s monthly update, Core Scientific sold 7,202 mined coins for $167 million in the previous month, which resulted in a 79% decrease in the amount of Bitcoin it had on hand. “Our industry is enduring tremendous stress as capital markets have weakened, interest rates are rising and the economy deals with historic inflation. Our company has successfully endured downturns in the past, and we are confident in our ability to navigate the current market turmoil,” said Mike Levitt, Chief Executive Officer of the company.
Core Scientific is one of the largest publicly traded blockchain data center providers and miners of digital assets in North America. Using its facilities and intellectual property portfolio for colocated and self-mining digital asset mining, the company has operated blockchain data centers in North America since 2017.
In the month ended June, Core Scientific operated an estimated 103,000 ASIC servers, producing 10.3 EH/s. Over the next six months, the Company expects to deploy approximately 70,000 additional self-mining ASIC servers. The additional servers have already been paid for to the tune of approximately 90%.
Major cryptocurrency lenders may be at risk as a result of some miners’ increased difficulty in repaying up to $4 billion in loans secured by their equipment due to Bitcoin’s protracted price decline.
“Bitcoin miners, broadly speaking, are feeling pain,” said Luka Jankovic, head of lending at Galaxy Digital. “A lot of operations have become net IRR negative at these levels. Machine values have plummeted and are still in price discovery mode, which is compounded by volatile energy prices and limited supply for rack space,” he added, as reported by Bloomberg late last month.
A large majority of Bitcoin mined by public mining companies are often held by the company as a proxy in the stock market to attract investors who want to access the cryptocurrency market without holding tokens directly. The value of Bitcoin is expected to rise over time, so some companies believe they will benefit from holding a large number of tokens in the long run.
