Daily bitcoin (BTC) mining revenue and gross profit dropped in October for a fourth straight month, JPMorgan (JPM) said in a research report Friday.
The bank estimated that bitcoin miners earned an average of $41,800 per exahash per second (EH/s) of hashrate in daily block reward revenue, 1% less than in September. Hashrate refers to the total combined computational power used to mine and process transactions on a proof-of-work blockchain and is a proxy for competition in the industry and mining difficulty.
Profitability also fell. The bank estimated that daily block reward gross profit dropped 2% in October to the lowest level “on recent record.”
On a positive note, transactions fees spiked to as high as 60% of the block reward toward the end of the month, providing some hashprice relief, the bank said. The hashprice is a measure of mining company daily revenue.
The monthly average hashrate for the Bitcoin network surged to a record high of 702 EH/s in October, after a whopping 9% gain from the month previous, the report noted.
“The month-end seven-day moving average network hashrate stood higher at 748 EH/s, up 18% from the end of September and up 62% year-on-year,” analysts Reginald Smith and Charles Pearce wrote.
The total market cap of the 14 publicly listed miners that the bank tracks rose 14% to $23.9 billion, led by companies with high-performance computing (HPC) exposure.
