The Chinese bitcoin miner manufacturer Canaan is seeing huge demand for its AvalonMiner product lately and expects this to rise in 2020.
This article was originally published by 8btc and written by Lylian Teng.
Canaan Creative, the world’s second-largest bitcoin mining machine manufacturer, said it expects to sell 1 million bitcoin miners in 2020 as buying interest increases.
Chen Feng, sales director of the Hangzhou, China-based company, said in a live streaming interview with 8btc that the company had already received letters of intent demanding 500,000 units in total of its latest, powerful A10 and A11 miners, and they expect the number to surpass 1 million in 2020.
As the company’s official website shows, the AvalonMiner A10 series is priced between 6,541 yuan ($924) and 11,900 yuan ($1,680), while A11 models are priced between 9,999 yuan ($1,412) and 16,252 yuan ($2,295). A total of 1 million units would bring approximately $1.57 billion (assuming equal sales between both models) for the company.
To cater to the increasing market demand amid the bitcoin price rally of April 2019, bitcoin miner makers have been working in full swing to increase their output. As previously reported by 8btc, Bitmain has ordered 30,000 7nm wafers from the world’s largest dedicated semiconductor foundry, TSMC, which could lead to 90 million chips for about 625,000 units of 7nm miners (assuming all are Antminer S17 models).
In September 2019, MicroBT said it would deliver 200,000 units of its latest M20 models by the end of the month. While investors have to wait until January 2020 to receive the mining equipment, they keep placing preorders for bitcoin producers.
According to Wang Shenglin, sales director of Innosilicon, the Bitcoin network currently has about 4.3 million mining machines running on it, while the company estimates that the market is still seeing an increasing level of buying interest, with a shortage of 1.5 million mining units.
Despite these mining giants’ great ambitions, the supply capacity from chip manufacturers such as TSMC and Samsung remains a major bottleneck for the production capacity of all cryptocurrency miner manufacturers, whose needs are usually behind other electronic device makers for smartphones and personal computers.
Additionally, the bitcoin price’s recent drops since July 2019 could place downward pressure on the cryptocurrency market, which may scare off potential bitcoin miners. However, the climbing bitcoin hash rate seems to indicate that miners are still confident of their prospects.
According to Chen, a lot of big institutions and funds have already invested in bitcoin mining, and more institutional investors are coming with multimillion-dollar preorders of miners. If the bitcoin price can stay sideways in the next few months, the Bitcoin hash rate will go down in November 2019 as the window of cheap electricity in Sichuan comes to an end along with the rainy season and old machines become obsolete.
But, the delivery of miners with much higher hash rates (most above 50T) would soon boost the network hash rate. Kong Jianping, co-founder of Canaan, estimated that the Bitcoin hash rate might double by the end of 2020 if the bitcoin price goes up after the halving.