Large cryptocurrency miners sell equipment for a song

According to The Wall Street Journal, large mining companies have started selling cryptocurrency mining rigs, hoping to cover losses due to the fall in the value of digital assets on the market.

The sale of equipment is also driven by the need to pay off loans that have not paid off — during the period of rising cryptocurrency prices, mining companies actively purchased machines and rented premises for them, often on credit. However, since the beginning of 2022, digital asset prices have fallen, causing a decrease in interest in cryptocurrency mining, which has led to large losses for miners.

As The Wall Street Journal found out, some companies are selling new equipment that has not even been unpacked yet. At the same time, companies without large debts have a chance to make a profit, so they buy up competitors' equipment. Obviously, it is still possible to make money from mining, but not on the same scale as before.

The ex-miners of the Ethereum cryptocurrency, which switched to the green blockchain, have suffered significantly. From now on, they mine altcoins (Ethereum Classic, Ravencoin, and Ergo) and move to cloud computing so that expensive equipment does not just sit idle. Chris Kiley, head of marketing at Flexpool, a mining pool, said that several dozen graphics cards will even heat real estate in Vancouver: «Now that it’s getting colder, I’m going to turn them back on… the graphics cards generate heat from the load, so it makes sense to just run the GPU rather than turn on the devices that heat the house.»