Data shows the price of the Bitcoin ASIC miners has plunged down to the lowest value since January of last year as mining profitability drops off.
Prices Of Bitcoin ASIC Miners Have Observed A Decline In Recent Months
According to the latest weekly report from Arcane Research, the current downtrend in the prices of ASIC miners is likely to continue in the near future.
An application-specific integrated circuit (or ASIC in short) is a type of device tailor made to perform a specific function.
Bitcoin ASIC miners are therefore machines that are optimized for the sole purpose of mining on the BTC blockchain.
The ability or the power of these rigs to mine BTC is called the “hashrate,” and it’s usually measured in terahash per second (TH/s).
Now, here is a chart that shows how the price of the most energy efficient BTC ASICs has changed over the past year and a half:
Looks like the value of these mining rigs has significantly gone down over the last few months | Source: Arcane Research's The Weekly Update - Week 25, 2022
In the above graph, the price of the most efficient Bitcoin ASIC miner is measured in terms of the dollar cost for every TH/s.
During the height of the early 2021 bull run, the ASIC mining machine price peaked out at a value of $120 per TH/s.
Related Reading | Bitcoin Bearish Signal: Coinbase Receives Large Inflows
But a couple of months later China cracked down on miners in the country, forcing them to flood the market with their rigs, which lead to a crash in the value of ASIC miners.
The Bitcoin mining rigs rebounded and once again hit a peak later in November of that year as BTC rallied to a new all-time high.
However, since then, as the BTC price itself has declined, the prices of the ASIC mining machines have also observed a drop.
Currently, these miners cost the same as they did back in January 2021. The reason behind this fall is that mining profits have shrunk down recently.
Related Reading | Bitcoin Mining Facility Shut Down Following Sharp Decline In Miner Profitability
Miners depend on the USD income from their rewards to keep up their mining operations. As the value of BTC has crashed, so have the miners’ revenues.
The report notes that this trend is likely to continue in the near future as many large mining companies have bought their rigs on debt.
Some of these miners who won’t be able to pay the debt off due to low profitability will have to dump their machines, further crashing the ASIC prices down.
BTC Price
At the time of writing, Bitcoin’s price floats around $20k, down 2% in the past week.
BTC takes a plunge down | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView
Featured image from Brian Wangenheim on Unsplash.com, charts from TradingView.com, Arcane Research