Bitcoin mining company Riot Blockchain boosted the size of its mining fleet to over 44,000 miners while more than 3,000 are ready for deployment. The company sold $14.4 million worth of their Bitcoin treasury and had a 30 million share offering to increase its cash position.
Riot released its Q2 Bitcoin mining and production update on August 16th 2022, where it highlighted ongoing capitulation trends within the Bitcoin mining sector. However, Riot's Bitcoin sales were used for expanding their mining fleet while other companies were pressured to utilize funds for staying afloat.
Riot’s report shows that its year-over-year (YoY) BTC production increased by 107%, producing 1,395 BTC valued at around $34 million at the time of publication as opposed to 675 BTC, or roughly $16 million, the year before.
After all of Riot’s new miners are deployed, the company will have 47,511 application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) BTC miners producing close to 4.9 exahashes per second (EH/s). The company currently has up to 44,720 ASIC miners deployed with a hash rate of 4.4 EH/s.
Despite the recent acquisition of new ASICs and increased hashrate for both self-mining and hosted facilities, Riot still had to sell $14.4 million worth of Bitcoin while dumping 30.6 million shares on the stock market (which raised an additional $267 million for the company). As a result, Riot currently has assets worth $496 million, of which $270 million is cash-on-hand, an increase from $113 million cash value in this year’s first quarter.
Based on Riot’s update, the company is financially stronger even if the mining company capitulated and sold a portion of its Bitcoin holdings while dumping shares on the market. It is also important to note that Riot still has 6,653 BTC, or around $159 million, in its treasury.
Throughout this recent market downturn, the Bitcoin mining industry has continued to weather the storm. Bitcoin was sold more during Q2 than it was mined by large-scale miners like Core Scientific and Bitfarms. However, other miners like Hut 8 and Digithost are holding every Bitcoin they mine.