Bitcoin miners had estimated sales of $ 692 million in December, up 33% from November. This is evident from Coin Metrics’ on-chain data analyzed by CoinDesk.
After rising 48% in November, miners’ earnings continued to surge as Bitcoin surged over 300% last year and briefly traded above $ 29,000 for the first time on New Years Eve.
Sales estimates assume miners will sell their BTC immediately.
In terms of per terahash per second (TH / s), miners’ earnings have nearly tripled in the past three months, reaching $ 0.284 on Thursday. This comes from data from Luxor Technologies, the highest level since August 2019, as CoinDesk previously reported.
Network fees raised $ 68.3 million, or nearly 10% of total revenue, in December, a slight percentage decrease from 10.5% of revenue from fees in November.
Fees were quite volatile in December, hovering between $ 4 and over $ 12 per coin metric over the course of the month.
In particular, the share of fees in total revenue has risen sharply since April, before the network’s third block subsidy halved in May. Increasing fee income is important to keep the network secure, as subsidies decrease every four years.
The miners are taking advantage of the increase in sales and bringing more machines online, making it more difficult for the network to hit highs on Saturday after adjusting.
In addition, miners have ordered so many new machines to take advantage of the period of profitability growth that, for example, leading manufacturer Bitmain was sold out by August, although the price of some models had almost doubled.
