Five North American publicly traded mining companies mined a combined 1,802 BTC in July, up 58% from June, according to The Block.
July proved productive for Marathon Digital, Riot Blockchain, Argo Blockchain, Bitfarms and Hut 8, even though the firms did not meaningfully increase their mining capacity.
For the most part, the increase in cryptocurrency mining was driven by a record decline in Bitcoin mining difficulty of 28%, which occurred at the start of July. It then fell by a further 4.8%.
The difficulty tracks the hash rate, which in June fell sharply amid anti-mining campaigns in China. As a result, mining capacity outside China rose significantly.
Of the five companies, Riot and Marathon benefited the most, increasing Bitcoin mining by 82% and 66.42% respectively month-on-month. Marathon’s equipment fleet did not change in July, remaining at about 19,000 ASIC miners. Riot also said that due to infrastructure upgrades it postponed the deployment of recently acquired devices to August.
CEO Argo Blockchain Peter Wall explained the rise in mining by noting that the firm was able to benefit from the decline in global hashrate and mining difficulty. The company mined 34.73% more Bitcoin than in June.
Earlier in June, MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor described the Chinese authorities’ decisions on mining as “a one-trillion-dollar mistake” and noted that this would benefit miners in North America.
Subscribe to ForkLog news on Facebook.