US Mining Firm Plans To Double Hash Rate After Halving

According to the US mining firm Riot Blockchain, there are plans for purchase of an additional equipment for its post-halving operations. The mining firm has more than doubled the number of next-generation Bitcoin (BTC) miners that it has purchased – by buying even 1,040 Antminer S19s from Bitmain on May 6.

The additional miners cost the firm approximately $1.9 million, following Riot’s purchase of 1,000 S19 Pros which was revealed on April 30. Anticipating that these units will have been shipped and deployed during the third quarter of this year, Riot expects the coming 2,040 S19s to increase its operational hash rate by 80% by 2021.

The US mining firm plans to command an operating hash rate of 457 petahashes per second, all while using approximately 16.5 megawatts of electricity after its deployment. A spokesperson who represented Bitmain in North America stated that the firm “has been working with Riot Blockchain for several years,” with Riot “using [Bitmain’s] Antminer products for operating their data centers.”

Meanwhile, the crypto news also show that the US mining firm Riot’s near-multi-million dollar purchase from Bitmain happened on the same day when the ASIC manufacturer acknowledged having problems with a recently shipped batch of Antminer S17s – and miners reported failure rates as high as 30% among the units.

The company told the media that it is currently negotiating with customers who have purchased defective units, encouraging more affected users to contact it directly. After reporting that the COVID-19 pandemic had impacted the business activities at their facility in Oklahoma, the US mining firm relocated a portion of its recently purchased S17 miners to a facility that is operated by the mining  equipment firm Coinmint, located in New york.

Last week, reports in the Bitcoin news showed that one New Jersey judge granted seven motions of dismissal ending a two-year lawsuit against Riot Blockchain, alleging that the firm misled its shareholders at the beginning of 2018.

All of this speaks for the popularity of Bitcoin lately. Despite the relatively hard drop of around 9% overnight, Bitcoin mining is still a profitable business for big companies – and the US mining firm Riot Blockchain knows this by heart.

On Monday, BTC will go through its halving which means that the block size for mining will be reduced from 12 BTC to 6.25 BTC per block, accordingly.