Bitcoin Mining Is Consolidating Like Never Before – Here’s How
Five companies now account for 21% of bitcoin production
Bitcoin’s network hashrate—a measure of bitcoin’s computing power—saw a moderate increase last month, averaging 780 EH/s. However, this did not lessen the competition among the largest mining forces.
In January, the five largest public mining companies – MARA, CleanSpark, Cango, Iris Energy, and Riot – mined 21.07% of the total bitcoin block rewards.
For comparison, in January 2024, the top five public miners by proprietary bitcoin production were MARA, Core Scientific, Riot, CleanSpark, and Cipher Mining, collectively responsible for only 11.4% of total block rewards that month.
This increase in the combined market share of the top five public mining companies over the past year highlights industry-wide consolidation following the bear market and the new reality of ever-difficult bitcoin mining.
In fact, their combined market share was even higher at 21.84% in December before declining in January, despite their efforts to expand their combined hashrate capacity from 186.8 EH/s at the end of 2024 to 189.8 EH/s as of January 31, 2025.
The decline was due to curtailment activities aimed at stabilizing the grid during extreme weather conditions, contributing to a previous drop in difficulty. Some major public mining companies only achieved about 80% of their deployed hashrate capacity. MARA reported an energized capacity of 53 EH/s in January, yet its bitcoin production of 750 BTC indicated a realized hashrate of only 41 EH/s.
This dynamic intensified competition further among the top mining companies in January, with MARA’s decline and Riot’s catch-up, while CleanSpark, Cango, and Iris Energy maintained steady uptime.
According to TheMinerMag’s Realized Hashrate metric, MARA dropped to the low 40 EH/s range in January, while CleanSpark, Cango, Riot, and Iris Energy competed closely in the 30 EH/s range. Iris Energy took a big leap in December, increasing its realized hashrate from 19.70 EH/s to 28.06 EH/s within a month, and closed out the year with 31 EH/s in deployed capacity. It will be interesting to see how they improve uptime as weather conditions recover in February.
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