Bitcoin mining company Riot Blockchain has announced the purchase of more than 1,000 additional mining machines in the face of bitcoin’s latest halving event, set to occur on Tuesday of next week.
Riot Blockchain Is Boosting Its Efforts
The company put out a statement explaining that it has bought 1,040 next-generating Bitmain S19 (95 TH) Antminers. Overall, the company spent just shy of $2 million on the machines. The company says it will use these machines to up the ante on its mining efforts. In total, Riot Blockchain now employs over 2,000 mining machines.
In a statement, the enterprise mentions:
The total 2,040 new S19 miners will be received and deployed in the third quarter of 2020. Once the total 2,040 new S19s are received and fully deployed, Riot estimates its aggregate operating hash rate will increase over 80 percent to approximately 457 peta hash per second (PH/s) and utilize approximately 16.5 megawatts of energy.
This is interesting considering just last month, the company was issuing a complaint that economic problems brought on by COVID-19 were causing the company to lose money and suffer financially. Is it possible that Riot has managed to recover so quickly?
Back in early April, Riot Blockchain issued a statement that many of their workers were being forced to stay at home and self-quarantine. While some were continuing to run mining operations remotely, the problem was that bitcoin and crypto mining was considered a non-essential enterprise within the United States. Thus, many people had simply turned off their machines and new bitcoin blocks weren’t being extracted.
Riot Blockchain – aside from running its own mining firm – sells equipment to independent miners as well. The economic shutdown prevented Riot from making necessary sales, and as a result, its revenue was alleged to be taking a dive… So deep, in fact, that Riot was unable to predict what would happen in the coming future.
At the time, the company explained:
If we are unable to effectively service our miners, our ability to mine bitcoin will be adversely affected as miners go offline.
The Halving Is Coming Up
Now, the company appears to be upping the ante on its own extraction efforts, but there’s another problem in that the halving is set to occur in just a matter of days. Whatever money Riot was set to earn through the mining process is now being cut in half, which means that Riot – despite its many machines – is not going to make the revenue it would have a few months ago.
Either way, the addition of more than 1,000 mining machines to its operation seems to be a case of too little and too late at the time of writing. Based in Colorado, Riot Blockchain recently moved part of its mining operation to upstate New York given the area’s cheap and affordable energy rates.
