Bitcoin Hash Rate Takes a Hit After a Coal Mining Accident in Northwest China

The hashrate of Bitcoin mining pools has plunged in the past 24 hours.

According to BTC.com, Poolin saw the biggest drop of 34.55% among the top miners, followed by Chinese cryptocurrency exchange Huobi’s Huobi.pool, as it saw its hash rate plummet by 26.21%.

Antpool and Binance Pool both had a nearly 21% fall in their hash rate as well.

This drop in hashrate was due to a huge coal mine accident in Xinjiang, and now “Northwest China is undergoing a complete blackout for safety inspections.”

The Fengyuan coal mine in Hutubi County in the northwest of the country was reported to be flooded last week. Many miners had been trapped in the underground flood in the Xinjiang region of China, which are currently being rescued.

“All the big data centers (includes bitcoin mining farms) are temporarily suspended for the fire inspection (might be resume in a week),” noted Molly of HashKey Group.

Source: BTC.com

Over the past year, F2Pool has been leading with almost 17% of hashrate dominance, followed by Pooling at 14%, BTC.com at 12%, and Antpool at 11%.

Lately, leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance has been capturing more and more Bitcoin mining market share. Over the past three months, however, Binance Pool’s share has climbed to 11.6%.

Amidst this, miner maker Bitmain announced the release of the Ethereum ASIC mining machine E9, which may reach about 1500M hashrate, but due to a shortage of chips, it may not have the production capacity reported Wu Blockchain.

Meanwhile, Nasdaq-listed Chinese company TAOP has purchased 3,000 Bitmain S19j Pro mining machines at a price of about 24 million.