Chinese cryptocurrency mining rig maker Bitmain, one of the world’s largest rig manufacturers, said today in a blog post that it had decided to suspend global spot sales of its Antminer machines, as some of its clients were reselling their rigs.
Fast facts:
- Bitmain said in the post that some of its Chinese clients were offloading their supplies and that “the second-hand market is under great pressure.” Its move to halt the sales had been taken to help the industry with a smooth transition, the company said. Bitmain’s announcement comes amid a slump in mining rig prices, and two days after Forkast.News reported that it was suspending sales, citing Chinese media outlet Jiemian.
- Customers who have already placed orders would not be affected, and the company will continue to take orders from September onwards, according to the post.
- The rig maker said that its staff and its clients were seeking quality power resources in countries such as the U.S., Canada, Australia, Russia, Belarus, Sweden, Norway, Kazakhstan, Angola, Congo and Indonesia, according to the statement.
- “The recent ban [on] mining in China has seen the market flooded with second-hand machines,” Alejandro De La Torre, a vice president at Poolin, a major mining pool with significant operations in China, told Forkast.News today. “I can see how this will also garner goodwill from miners across China.”
- Bitmain’s move comes as China has recently tightened the screws on the crypto mining sector, promoting Chinese miners to consider decamping to countries in which they are less unwelcome.
- Bitmain called a meeting of businesses in the crypto mining industry on June 19 in Chengdu, the capital of the southwestern province of Sichuan, to offer assistance to clients that want to relocate their cryptocurrency mining operations overseas.
