Bitcoin (BTC) network eased a key difficulty parameter last week to coax back miners who quit after last week's block halving slashed their profits. More than 20 exahashes per second of computing power, equal to 1.5 million older-generation mining machines or 20% of the previous hash power, were switched off since the recent halving. But on Wednesday, Bitcoin's mining difficulty, which measures how hard it is for miners to compete for block rewards, declined 6% to 15.14 trillion. Bitcoin's mining difficulty adjusts itself every 2,016 blocks or about 14 days to ensure the average interval between new blocks stays at 10 minutes. According to miner profitability data tracked by PoolIn and F2Pool, now older generations of miners will not see profit with an electricity rate above 5 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Here is the rest of the week in review:
Kik, the messaging app firm, is considering moving its kin cryptocurrency from its own fork of Stellar (XLM) to the Solana (SOL) blockchain, a high-throughput blockchain that relies on an idea called optimistic concurrency control. A Kin Improvement Proposal shared with CoinDesk states: "The fork of Stellar enabled Kin to reach millions of consumers, but we knew it would not be a long-term solution." Anatoly Yakovenko of the Solana Foundation said: "Kin is one the best ways to show what Solana is capable of." For the transfer, the Solana Foundation would actually pay the Kin Foundation up to 1% of the supply of SOL, with 0.1% unlocking for each new 1 million active users that join kin over a 24-month period. Firms and developers are rewarded for building on the kin ecosystem with daily token distributions from the Kin Rewards Engine.
Canaan reported a net loss of $5.6 million for the first quarter, even though it had slashed prices for its hardware by more than half in an effort to sell more mining equipment. The Chinese miner maker posted revenue of $9.4 million in revenue, up 44.6% from the prior year period. But Canaan also incurred $9.3 million in cost of goods sold and $5.9 million in research and development expenses. Canaan sold 0.9 million terahashes per second of Bitcoin computing power, less than 1% of the network's current total. On Friday chief executive Zhang Nangeng said the overall crypto market was "not too good" during the quarter, pushing unit prices lower. Zhang added the firm is partnering with China-based Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation to launch BTC miners featuring 14-nm chips.
Crypto prices slipped to $253 billion this week. For the majors, Tezos (XTZ) and Binance Coin (BNB) posted small gains, while Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash (BCH), EOS, and the others fell. In the top 100, the biggest losers were ABBC Coin (ABBC), down 21%, Hyperion (HYN), down 18%, and 0x (ZRX), down 16%. The biggest gainers were Theta Fuel (TFUEL), up a whopping 474%, THETA, up 83%, and OmiseGO (OMG), up 76%. Next week traders will watch to see which direction crypto makes its next move.
The author owns a small amount of BTC.