A prolonged market winter is creating conditions that were not expected a year ago in the Bitcoin mining industry. One of the items experiencing the effects of the bear market the most is ASIC equipment, which is marking record lows.
According to Hashrate Index metrics, the most efficient ASICs on the market are at record low prices, which contrasts with the record highs reached a year ago. The most efficient ASIC models, capable of producing more hashrate with less power consumption, show this decline through a value called “ASIC price”.
The ASIC price (or ASIC price) is a value assigned to a computing unit (terahash or TH), according to the efficiency or energy expenditure of each mining equipment. It can be expressed in dollars (USD) or bitcoin (BTC).
To get an idea of how this value can be used, we can imagine an equipment with a power of 110 TH/s, quoted with an ASIC price of USD 40/TH. Its market price could be USD 4,400 or less.
Thus, all devices with an efficiency below 38 J/TH currently have an ASIC price of USD 20.01/TH, down 3% since the beginning of November. This category includes state-of-the-art models such as Bitmain’s Antminer S19, S19j and S19 Pro and MicroBTC’s Whatsminer M30s, M30s+ and M30s++ models, among others.
Equipment with an efficiency between 38 J/TH and 68 J/TH has an ASIC price of USD 13.06/TH, down 5.8% since the beginning of November. This category includes mid-generation ASICs such as Bitmain’s Antminer S17 and T17 series and MicroBT’s Whatsminer M20, M21 and M32 series models, among others.
An unexpected “black Friday” for ASIC equipment
If we compare the current values of Bitcoin mining equipment with the prices they reached at the end of last year, when the bitcoin (BTC) market was touching all-time highs, we observe a drop of 80%.
In this context, it stands out the fact that the least efficient equipment has depreciated up to 17%, in the order of USD 5/TH. Hashrate Index notes in a tweet, “older generation rig values are getting completely crushed as margins continue to evaporate.”
The fall of ASIC equipment prices started to be evident since the beginning of this year.
Currently, Bitcoin mining equipment prices are comparable to those of 2020, when the cryptocurrency market was conditioned by the crisis generated by Covid-19 and the mining ban in China.
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