Bitfarms (BITF) ended 2022 on a high note, mining 496 Bitcoin in December for a yearly total of 5,167 BTC. The company was consistently a top-three miner every month, when you consider the amount of Bitcoin mined by EH/s, and featured as the top miner in no less than five of the 12 months in 2022.
Year-over-year, Bitfarms grew 50% in terms of Bitcoin mined with 3,453 Bitcoin achieved in 2021. Moveover, the company's production places it in the top three miners for the year in terms of physical Bitcoin production by North American publicly traded miners, with Core Scientific (CORZQ) and Riot Platforms, Inc. (RIOT), as the only miners to achieve 5,000 Bitcoin mined in 2022.
Bitfarms had originally planned to get to 8 EH/s by the end of the year and yet managed only 4.5 EH/s. Although disappointing on first view, miners did face lower margins, tighter competition and increasing costs throughout 2022.
Facilities
Bitfarms mined at a rate of 16 Bitcoin per day, an increase of 6% on the previous month’s daily production rate. The company achieved this by increasing its hashrate to 4.5 EH/s by bringing online additional power in Sherbrooke, Québec, as follows:
- 12 MW of the Garlock farm
- 6 MW of Phase 3 of The Bunker
- 96 MW at the Sherbrooke campus
The company also completed construction of the first 50 MW warehouse in Rio Cuarto, Argentina.
The company was also able to underclock a number of its underperforming miners, which actually produced 15% more efficiency and saved 4 MW of power. The company also curtailed energy by releasing 4000 MWhs back to the grid.
Debt and hashrate
Bitfarms is also taking a more balanced approach to growth and has in recent months been reducing the amount of leveraged debt on the balance sheet, which was nearly $100 million debt in Q2 2022.
Having held 96% of its total 2021 Bitcoin production, the company has sold 9,063 Bitcoin throughout 2022. The firm sold 1,755 Bitcoin in December for nearly $30 million. It also sold de la Pointe farm for $3.6 million, and used some of these total funds to repay the final $16.5 million of the Bitcoin-backed line of credit with Galaxy Digital (GLXY) and further paid down $2 million in equipment-related debt during the month. Shareholders will be pleased that these decisions have provided the company with a much healthier balance sheet and a much reduced outstanding debt balance of $47 million.
Another significant move by Bitfarms was to cancel some of its existing miner purchasing agreements, totaling $45.4 million, without penalty, and have the ability to use the related prepaid deposits of $22.4 million for future agreements. As of Dec. 31, 2022, the company had a total of $31 million in cash and cash equivalents.
As for this quarter, Bitfarms expects to energize 5,600 miners with a hashrate of 540 PH/s to replace some of the underperforming miners. Overall hashrate is expected to rise to 5.0 EH/s by the end of Q1 2023.
