Floods in China knock the hash rate of the largest Bitcoin mining pools

Heavy rains in China’s Sichuan province have led to a fall in the hash rate of leading Bitcoin mining pools. Companies are forced to shut down equipment and evacuate staff, according to CoinDesk.

Farms located in Sichuan control more than 50% of the Bitcoin network’s computing power. The largest pools are Poolin, F2Pool, BTC.com and Antpool, whose hash rate, according to BTC.com, fell as low as 20%. For Binance Pool and OKEx Pool, this figure exceeded 26%.

Poolin chief Kevin Pan said that in some regions there are connectivity and internet issues, causing farms to temporarily halt operations. A number of pools have partially suspended operations and evacuated staff to safe zones.

Excessive rainfall in the province has persisted for more than a week. According to Xinhua News Agency, this year’s rainfall volume has been record-breaking. Some hydroelectric plants have had to suspend operations, causing power supply disruptions.

Despite the events in Sichuan, on Monday, 17 August, the Bitcoin hash rate updated its historic maximum. This metric exceeded 129 EH/s, but at the time of publication had fallen to 127 EH/s.

At the end of July, analytics firm Coin Metrics reported a slowdown in Bitcoin’s hash rate growth over the past two years. Experts suggested that the situation could be helped by the rainy season in China.

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