Local authorities in China’s Xinjiang province have ordered Bitcoin miners to shut down their operations immediately, as first reported by The Block. The local government in Changji Hui Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang issued a notice on Wednesday to its subordinate government officials in the Zhundong Economic-Technological Development Park to shut down all crypto mining activities under their administration by 2:00 pm China time on Wednesday.
You may like: El Salvador to recognise bitcoin as legal tender.
According to Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, China has a 65.08% monthly hash rate share followed by the USA at 7.24%. Xinjiang leads among Chinese provinces with a mining hash rate share of 35.76% in the country’s share making this crackdown a significant one.
Also read: RBI says no change in stance on crypto
The North-West Chinese province has huge reserves of coal and other non-renewable sources of energy and is a hotbed to the crypto mining industry. The new developments are in the background of a crackdown announced by Chinese authorities in the last week of May. In May, the local government of China’s Inner Mongolia region has proposed eight measures to phase out crypto mining activities in the province.
Mining pools based out of China have seen a sharp fall in hash rate in the last 24 hours (see above image). Hash rates of mining pools SlushPool, BTC.TOP, Foundry USA, Rawpool which are primarily based outside China have remained constant during the same period.
3, In past 48 hours, Chinese miners already started to accelerate migrating process to other countries. There will also be large quantities of Bitcoin mining machines available for sales.
— Mustafa Yilham (@MustafaYilham) May 23, 2021
As the Chinese miners are moving out of the country, the Chinese bitcoin mining-machine manufacturer and Nasdaq listed Canaan Creative had announced that 78% of its Q1 bitcoin miner revenue came from outside China.
