In this article, we bring you the most interesting recent observations about the current state of Bitcoin mining, BTC millionaires, Bitcoin’s recent price action, investor sentiment, and Fidelity Digital Assets’ survey on institutional adoption of crypto.

Bitcoin Mining

TokenInsight recently released its “Bitcoin Mining Special Edition – The Third Halving (June 2020)” report. 

Here are a few highlights from this report:

  • The share of Bitcoin’s hash rate in China has been decreasing since September 2019, dropping from 75.63% back then to around 65.08% where it is today. 
  • Since the May 11 halving, if you are a miner using Bitmain's Antminer S17+ (which has a hash rate of 70 TH/s), to be profitable, you need your electricity cost to be below $0.08 per kWh; however, if you are still using the much slower Antminer S19 (with a maximum hash rate of 14 TH/s), which was launched in May 2016, you need your electricity cost to be under $0.035 per kWh.
  • The average block time has gone from 560 seconds before the halving to 689 seconds after the halving, suggesting a drop of around 20% in the Bitcoin network’s hash rate.

TokenInsight also pointed out that according to data from Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF), as of April 2020, when it comes to the average monthly hash rate, the top five countries are China (65%), the U.S. (7.24%), Russia (6.9%), Kazakhstan (6.17%), and Malaysia (4.33%).

Talking about miners, on Tuesday (June 9), on-chain market intelligence startup Glassnode noted that “netflow to/from miner wallets (30d MA) has been consistently positive for the past 9 months”:

Bitcoin Millionaires

On Tuesday (June 9), crypto analytics startup Santiment observed that the number of Bitcoin millionaires, i.e. addresses holding more than 100 BTC, has been growing over the past few months:

Bitcoin’s Recent Price Action

According to dta from CryptoCompare, currently (as of 10:21 UTC on June 11), Bitcoin is trading at $9,787, up 0.48% in the past 24-hour period:

24 Hour CC Chart for BTC-USD on 11 June 2020.png

This means that today (June 11) is the ninth day that Bitcoin’s price has stayed below the $10,000 level.

However, it is worth noting that yesterday, 15 minutes after the start of Fed Chair Jereme Powell’s FOMC press conference — i.e. around 18:45 UTC on June 10 — Bitcoin’s price came quite close to breaking through the $10K resistance level, reaching as high as $9,940.

Investor Sentiment

Yesterday, Santiment noticed that Bitcoin-related sentiment on crypto social media has “turned increasingly bearish as June has progressed:

However, Santiment says that this may not necessarily be bearish for Bitcoin’s short-term price action:

Fidelity’s Survey on Institutional Adoption of Bitcoin

On June 9, Fidelity Digital Assets, a subsidiary of financial services giant Fidelity Investments, issued a press release (about its latest research), which said that cryptoassets “are gaining in favorability and appeal amongst institutional investors, with almost 80% of investors surveyed finding something appealing about the asset class.” 

In Fidelity’s survey of “almost 800 institutional investors across the U.S. and Europe”, which “was conducted from November 2019 to early March 2020”, 36% of the respondents say that they are “currently invested in digital assets, and 6 out of 10 believe digital assets have a place in their investment portfolio.” 

The institutional investors surveyed included “financial advisors, family offices, pensions, crypto and traditional hedge funds, high net worth investors, and endowments and foundations.”

Perhaps, this encouraging research is partly why yesterday Mike Novogratz’s crypto-focused merchant bank Galaxy Digital and crypto custodian and Bitcoin derivatives exchange Bakkt announced that they are partnering to “launch a collaborative white-glove service for asset managers looking to acquire, build positions in and store bitcoin (“BTC”).” 

Featured Image by “petre_barlea” via Pixabay.com