There is a real competitiveness between mining firms – one I have been tracking since September 2021 with monthly updates. June proved to be no different than previous months. Regardless of energy curtailment caused by warm weather or high network difficulty, some miners continue to outperform their peers in what is comfortably identified as a performance trend.

The table below highlights that Hive Blockchain had the best month in terms of mined bitcoin and self mined revenue by EH/s, followed by Cleanspark, Iris Energy, Hut 8 and Bitfarms.

Hive Blockchain

Hive has produced consistently near their expected Bitcoin month-in-and-out over the past 18 months, based on self-reported figures. They continue to benefit from their large Ethereum mining operation, and in June produced 2,542 ETH worth approximately $3 million at time of publishing.

The firm mined 279 Bitcoin last month, resulting in a total self-mining revenue of $8.32 million or $2.6m per EH/s in operation. The firm currently has a Bitcoin hodl balance of 3,239 Bitcoin and 7,667 Ethereum as of July 6, 2022.

From a financial health perspective, Hive also benefits from having very little debt on the balance sheet, minus a long-term real estate mortgage from a Canadian bank with interest at less than 4%. The low exposure to debt puts them in a strong financial position as they look to expand their hashrate to 6.2 EH/s by early 2023.

Cleanspark

Cleanspark had yet another good month, producing 339 Bitcoin and taking their year-to-date total to 1,863 Bitcoin. They sold 328 Bitcoin in June at an average price of $25,644 per Bitcoin, providing revenues of $8.4 million. Unlike some miners, Cleanspark has occasionally sold its mined Bitcoin to pay for capital and operational costs.

Their current Bitcoin hodl is 561 BTC while their deployed mining fleet has increased to a total of 28,500 latest-generation Bitcoin miners providing a hashrate exceeding 2.8 EH/s. Their June daily production actually reached 12.1 Bitcoin per day, an increase of 12.3% from their May daily production rate.

Iris Energy

Of all the North American listed Bitcoin miners, Iris Energy is the most consistent year-to-date with June being no exception.

Iris Energy produced 148 Bitcoin, achieving $3.5 million in revenue at an average operating hashrate of 1.164 EH/s. Iris Energy sells their Bitcoin on a daily basis to pay for their capital and operational requirements and have certainly benefited from this strategy over the past seven months.

While the monthly update was cheerful, some headwinds are possibly ahead. Iris has amended its future growth–originally set at 15.2 EH/s during the bull cycle–to a more manageable 4.3 EH/s by end 2022. The company is also in discussions over machine order deposits of $130 million already paid towards the original growth target and a further $400 million machine order outstanding. Time will tell how these orders will be handled given lower Bitcoin prices.

Bitfarms

Bitfarms mined 420 Bitcoin worth an approximate $8.45 million during June 2022, achieving an average of 14 Bitcoin per day in June or about $280,000 per day. The mining firm holds 3,144 BTC worth $63 million as of June 20 after selling 3,352 Bitcoin to meet loan repayment conditions with Galaxy Digital and cover operational costs.

The operational hashrate sits at 3.6 EH/s–a monthly increase of 6%–and is still on track to achieve 6.0 EH/s by end of the year. Bitfarm’s Bunker site is also entering Phase 2 of deployments. At 36 megawatts (MW) in size and powering approximately 913 PH/s, the new site is a key reason for Bitfarm’s increased production, Bitfarms Chief Mining Officer Ben Gagnon said.

Hut 8

Hut 8 Mining Corp increased its Bitcoin holdings by 328 BTC, at an average rate of 10.9 per day. Hut 8 confirmed its commitment to its hodl strategy and now has 7,406 Bitcoin held unencumbered in reserve at a value of $149 million.

The company has also seen their operating capacity increase to 2.78 EH/s and production at the new North Bay site scaled up throughout the month, with approximately 5,800 miners operating on 20 MW of power by June 30. Additional scaling will continue at North Bay in the coming weeks

Hut 8 have benefited from the decision to purchase TeraGo, a high performance computing business, not correlated to Bitcoin or Bitcoin mining, which continues to bring in steady monthly recurring revenue and remains on track to grow up to 18% by the end of 2022.

Closing thoughts

The table below provides the monthly performance of these miners over the first 6 months of 2022.

Iris Energy is currently ranked highest from a performance by EH/s perspective, but all the other miners, discussed above, achieved well over 90% of the performance achieved by Iris Energy, with both Hive Blockchain and Cleanspark achieving in excess of 99%.

Read: Understanding Bitcoin mining monthly production updates