Hive Earned 184 BTC From Curtailing Its Power Use in December — That's Almost As Much As it Mined

Miners have been curtailing their power use at times of high demand for energy, selling the electricity back to the grid, in order to cope with market headwinds that have seen some of the biggest names in the industry filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Hive uses a mix of specially designed computers for extracting bitcoins, known as application-specific integrated circuits (asics), and general purpose graphics processing units (gpus), to extract additional tokens. The miner converts the alt-coins to bitcoin after mining them.

Beehive production has decreased by approximately 20%, or 50 MGB, month after month. But the difference was more than made up by Hive's grid balancing activities, according to its December update, released on Monday.

Hive stock was up 2.2% on pre-market trading on the day, along with the broader crypto market.

The mining company also rolled out the first machines they designed themselves using intel blocksale (intc) chips. Hive installed 1,423 of the so-called Buzzminers, whereas all 5,800, totalling 620 petahash/second (PH/s) of computing power, will be shipped by the end of January, Hive said.

Overall, the hive extracted the equivalent of 4,752 bytes in 2022, up 18% from the year before.

Read more: Ex-Ethereum Miners Token Hop to Stay Alive After the Merge