Nearly all of the Bitcoin mined in 2022 was sold off by publicly traded Bitcoin miners, sparking a discussion about whether or not the sales caused “a persistent headwind” for the price of bitcoin.
According to information shared by Messari analyst Tom Dunleavy in a tweet on December 26, roughly 40,300 of the 40,700 BTC mined by Core Scientific, Riot, Bitfarms, Cleans Park, Marathon, Hut8, HIVE, Iris Energy, Argo, and Bit Digital between January 1 and November 30 were sold off.
The reserves held by mining companies have significantly decreased in the second half of 2022, particularly in November as the crypto industry struggled to recover from the fallout from the FTX.
Dunleavy thinks that the price of the top cryptocurrency is under pressure because miners are selling off newly created Bitcoin on a regular basis.
However, some industry observers, including Arthur Hayes, the former CEO of BitMEX, think the selling pressure brought on by the rise in sales of Bitcoin miners is hardly noticeable.
Even if miners sold all the Bitcoin they produced each day, he claimed in a blog post from December 9 that it “would barely impact the markets at all.”
On December 26, the daily trading volume for bitcoin was $12.2 billion, according to Bitcoin Visuals. According to CryptoQuant, the outflow from miners on the same day was 919 BTC ($15.35 million), which accounts for just 0.13% of the total volume traded.
The reserves of the miner have slightly recovered in December, rising by almost 1%. The data support the opinion expressed in a post by cryptocurrency analyst IT Tech on December 27 that things for miners appear to be stabilizing.
High electricity costs, declining cryptocurrency market prices, and an increase in mining difficulty have all hurt miners’ bottom lines throughout the year.
Miners like Core Scientific have been forced to sell some of their reserves at a loss in order to pay for their ongoing operations and efforts to expand as a result of the miners’ rising cost of production and the Bitcoin price’s declining value.