Report: More Chinese Miners Selling Short Following Crypto Market Slump

Chinese miners are reportedly becoming the biggest short sellers both locally and internationally, following an increased number of hedging operations in the current bear market, Chinese crypto outlet 8BTC reported Thursday, Dec. 6.

The severe cryptocurrency market decline in the last month has reportedly caused new generation miners to start hedging their coins to avoid market risks. At the same time, frequent hedging operations make miners the biggest short sellers of Bitcoin (BTC), according to 8BTC.

Jin Xin, a Chinese miner who entered the industry in October 2017, reportedly said that the earnings from mining he made in the first two months are “much more” than the total profits he made in the past three years through other business. Jin said:

“If I mine 30 tokens in the next month, while its price may continue to fall by another 10 percent according to the current trend, I shall place a short order on the exchange to sell them at current price but deliver one month later.”

Jin reportedly developed his own strategy to withstand the bear market. He buys already used graphic processing unit (GPU) miners to boost his machines’ performance. Once the “shutdown price” is reached, Jin power down the equipment, removes GPU chips and sells them to game players.

As Cointelegraph reported in late November, cryptocurrency mining operators in China are reportedly selling mining equipment by weight, as opposed to price per unit, as the market slump had resulted in a large drop in mining profitability. Crypto miners were reportedly especially eager to sell the older models, including Antminer S7, Antminer T9, and Avalon A741, as these have reached their “shutdown price.”

Also in November, U.S. technology giant Intel filed a new patent for “energy-efficient high-performance Bitcoin mining.” The patent is dedicated to a “hardware accelerator implementing SHA-256 hash using optimized data paths” and aims to reduce energy for BTC mining by up to 15 percent. The document states that “clusters of SHA engines may consume a lot of power (e.g., at a rate of greater than 200 W).”