Riot Blockchain Announces Record High Hash Rate Capacity

Although hash rate capacity is at a record, mining conditions did lead to a relative underperformance in bitcoin received throughout the month.

Riot Blockchain has released its unaudited production and operations updates for November 2022. According to the release, the company produced 521 BTC, a 12% increase on its November 2021 production of 466 BTC. It sold 450 BTC, generating net proceeds of $8.1 million, and had a deployed fleet of 72,428 miners with a hash rate capacity of 7.7 exahashes per second (EH/s) on 30 November.

Jason Les, CEO of Riot stated, “Riot again achieved a new record for total hash rate capacity during the month of November, resulting in our highest monthly bitcoin production figure to date.” He did caveat this positivity, saying, “Despite this new level of production, expected production was approximately 660 bitcoin given our operating hash rate over the month, assuming normalized performance of the mining pool we participate in. Variance in a mining pool can impact results and while this variance should balance out over time, can be volatile in the short term. This variance led to lower bitcoin production than expected in the month of November, relative to our hash rate.”

Bitcoin’s hash rate has been on a tear in recent months, achieving new all-time highs and effectively making miners not using cutting-edge equipment unprofitable. This in turn has an impact on the public companies exposed to this market.

To better formulate an outlook on their production, Les stated in the release, “In order to ensure more predictable results going forward, Riot will be transitioning to another mining pool which offers a more consistent reward mechanism, so that Riot will fully benefit from our rapidly growing hash rate capacity as we work towards our goal of reaching 12.5 EH/s in the first quarter of 2023.”

The report did not specify which mining pool Riot will now point its miners towards.

Looking ahead, Riot seeks to achieve a total self-mining hash rate capacity of 12.5 EH/s during Q1 2023, assuming full deployment of approximately 115,450 Antminer ASICs.

However, this does not include any potential incremental productivity gains from the company’s utilization of 200 MW of immersion-cooling infrastructure. The majority of Riot’s self-mining fleet will consist of the latest S19-series miners. In addition to its self-mining operations, the company hosts approximately 200 MW of institutional Bitcoin mining clients.