Bitcoin Mining Unit Manufacturer MicroBT Nibbles at Bitmain’s Market Share

Bitcoin miner maker MicroBT has rapidly expanded market share by selling over half a million units in 2019, chipping away at rival Bitmain’s dominance.

MicroBT sold about 600,000 units of its flagship WhatsMiner M20 series last year, Vincent Zhang, sales head of the Shenzhen-based company, said in an online panel hosted by Chinese mining pool Poolin on Thursday in a WeChat group.

These products generate a computing power of about 60 terahashes per second (TH/s) on average, he said. That means the newly delivered 600,000 units may have contributed over 30 exahashes (EH/s) of hashing power to the bitcoin network in 2019. (1 EH = 1 million TH).

Amid bitcoin’s price jump throughout 2019, the network’s two-week average computing power more than doubled from just 40 EH/s around the end of 2018 to nearly 100 EH/s in December. That’d mean close to half of bitcoin’s computing power growth in 2019 may have come from equipment delivered by MicroBT.

Zhang didn’t specify the precise average unit…