Bitcoin Miners Made Record $1.5 Billion Revenue In March

Bitcoin miners grabbed over $1.5 billion in Bitcoin block rewards and fees last month, according to a recent report from blockchain analytics company Arcane Research.

The report shows that despite the decrease in mining revenue toward the tail end of the month as trading volume settled down, the monthly tally still constitutes a record.

“Few had anticipated the scale of this bull run in September 2020. Back then, the monthly miner revenue sat at $329 million. Since then, the revenues have increased by 373 percent,” said Arcane Research in its report.

Mining is how transactions get added to the Bitcoin blockchain. Miners, usually in coordination with larger mining firms, use specialized hardware to run the Bitcoin software. The process provides the network with security as miners lend their computing power to solve cryptographic puzzles.

Miners are awarded bitcoin whenever they add a new block of transactions to the blockchain, which they can later sell on the market to fund operating costs or simply just to cash out. Transaction fees are another source of revenue.

Currently, miners receive a block reward of 6.25 BTC, with a new block mined every 10 minutes or so. What might be startling is that the block reward used to be higher. From July 9, 2016, until May 11, 2020, miners earned 12.5 BTC for every block mined. For the four years before that, it was 25 BTC, and for nearly the first four years of Bitcoin’s existence, block rewards were 50 BTC.

Arcane Research also reported that the recent mining revenue spike is rewarding miners who already had a well-established setup before the bitcoin bull run or great foresight in Q3 2020.