Hive Blockchain (HIVE), a Canadian bitcoin miner, earned $3.15 million, or the equivalent of about 184 bitcoin, in December despite mining 213.8 BTC for the month.
In order to deal with market pressures that have led to some of the biggest names in the industry filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, miners have been reducing their power use during times of high energy demand and selling the electricity back to the grid.
Hive mines other tokens using a combination of computers designed specifically for mining bitcoin, called application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC), and general-purpose graphics processing units (GPU). After mining the alternative coins, the miner converts them to bitcoin.
The monthly production of Hive decreased by about 20%, or 50 BTC. Hive’s grid balancing activities, however, more than made up for the difference, according to its December update, which was made public on Monday.
Along with the larger crypto market, the price of Hive stock increased 2.2% in pre-market trading on the day.
Additionally, the mining company put into operation its first self-designed machines using Blocksale chips from Intel (INTC). A total of 5,800 of the so-called Buzzminers, totaling 620 petahash/second (PH/s) of processing power, will be shipped by the end of January, according to Hive, which has already installed 1,423.
Hive mined 4,752 BTC in total throughout 2022, an increase of 18% from the previous year.