12 September  2024 · Block Height 861155 · Bitcoin Price $58K

Welcome back to the Blockspace Newsletter!

For today’s roundup, August operational updates from public bitcoin miners caught our eye, as did Fractal Bitcoin’s febrile first week, where transaction fee rewards for the newly-launched Bitcoin sidechain surpassed Bitcoin’s own (as we write this, Fractal Bitcoin is netting miners ~$17,000 in fees every ten minutes versus Bitcoin’s ~$4,000). For news, we cover Trump’s (unfortunate) DeFi aspirations, the cbBTC launch, and CATNIP (the token standard, not the quasi-drug for felines).

The Blockspace Newsletter is presented by Fold, the best place to buy Bitcoin. Click the banner to earn 20,000 Sats on them!

What caught our eye this week

Public bitcoin miners are selling BTC like it’s a bear market

For this week’s Mining Pod newsletter, we dig into the August operational updates of public bitcoin miners. The TLDR: miners are slogging away and slowly stacking new hashrate, and they are selling a lot of bitcoin.

As bitcoin mining rewards have diminished in the aftermath of April’s Halving, hashrate expansion is the only recourse public miners have to shore up that lost mining revenue. Nearly every public miner added hashrate in August, but some were more proactive than others. Most of the hashrate that came online was the result of next-generation ASIC miners like the S21 and M60 series that these public miners purchased in 2023.

With the Halving compressing profit margins, public bitcoin miners are taking notes from not-so-distant history and locking in revenue.

In the 2020-2021 bull market, a public bitcoin miner that sold their mined bitcoin was something of a pariah, a trend that came back to haunt bitcoin miners as they sold treasure troves of coins in 2022’s bear market. 

They’ve learned their lesson, it seems. Every bitcoin miner but Riot and Marathon (and CleanSpark, too, since their selling last month was negligible) sold bitcoin in August. Many sold close-to or as-much as they mined. (It’s worth noting that Terawulf and Iren have always made it a point to sell their production).

In case you missed it: for a what-caught-our-eye bonus this week, check out our special edition newsletter on Fractal Bitcoin’s first week, in which we cover FB token price, the hashrate pouring into the Fractal Bitcoin network, and the very real chance that Fractal Bitoin’s chain size balloons to 1 TB by the end of the year (yikes…).

Speaking of Fractal Bitcoin, a quick word from our friends at Nicehash! Hashprice is stuck at record lows of 0.00069 BTC/PH/Day or about 39 USD/PH/Day. On the other side, NiceHash pay rates are record breaking and practically back at pre-halving values!

The NiceHash pay rate (hashprice) averaged at about 0.00140 BTC/PH/day, or about 80 USD/PH/Day! Connecting to NiceHash is as straightforward as connecting to any other pool. Check the guide here or click the banner to learn more!

News roundup

Trump’s bewildering DeFi scheme

Donald Trump endeared himself to the Bitcoin world with his embrace of the industry this year, which culminated in a keynote at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville. But he isn’t just stopping at Bitcoin – he’s fully embracing shitcoiner grift with “WorldLibertyFi,” a DeFi project that does…something, presumably.

Trump tweeted a video officially owning the project and “embracing the future with crypto,” in his words. The project appears to be a fork of Dough Finance, a recently hacked DeFi project. Trump will stream an announcement revealing more on Monday, September 16.

Coinbase launches 1:1 BTC-backed cbBTC on Base

cbBTC reached $100m market cap on Thursday’s launch, with liquidity split almost evenly between ETH and Base. This comes at a time when the leading wrapped Bitcoin product, WBTC, may be losing it’s moat in the DeFi ecosystem.

Taproot Wizards tease “CATNIP” tokens

In the midst of a Runes and BRC20 bear market, Taproot Wizards founder Udi Wertheimer introduces a bitcoin-native token standard dubbed CATNIP,  which he claims will solve other token scheme issues and allow AMMs on Bitcoin. (Yes, CATNIP would require OP_CAT). Wizards CTO Rijndael provides a deeper technical breakdown on X.

Chart of the week

Bitcoin’s hashrate hit an all-time high of 700 EH/s on the 7-day average this week, only to subsequently tumble to 653 EH/s by September 12. Nearly five months after the Halving, Bitcoin’s hashrate continues to grow, which is negatively impacting mining profitability as Bitcoin’s difficulty rises in lock step. As a result, beleaguered miners who were already hit hard by the Halving’s revenue block subsidy continue to see their revenue shaved away, and the unprofitable ones are dropping off the network. It’s getting brutal out there.

Did you like this newsletter? If you did, please help us out by replying ‘CAT NIP!’