By Liam Frost
In brief
Bitcoin (BTC) miners are raking in record-breaking revenues amid the current rally, earning up to $52.3 million per day on average, according to a newsletter by crypto metrics platform Glassnode, published on Monday.
At the same time, Glassnode’s charts show that on a day-to-day basis, miners' profits have risen significantly higher. For example, the current all-time high of Bitcoin miners’ daily profit is $64.7 million, recorded on March 14.
In this month alone, miners also earned $54.6 million on March 3, $57.7 million on March 10, and nearly $60 million on March 12—and those are only the best days. The total miner revenue combines block rewards and transaction fees.
However, the peak days shouldn’t be considered sustainable, Glassnode’s analyst Checkmate, who is the author of the newsletter, explained to Decrypt. Instead, the $52.3 million figure was calculated using a 14-day moving average.
“I average over the difficulty period else it’s noisy and not equivalent to sustained reality, can be influenced by some quickly solved blocks one day that are not representative of actual income over time,” he told Decrypt.
Bitcoin miners earned $64.7 million in just one day. Image: Glassnode
In the newsletter, he also pointed out that such high revenues are an impressive feat, especially considering that Bitcoin miners’ block reward was halved—from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC—in May 2020. Since miners’ expenses are usually denominated in fiat currencies, it is crucial their profits don’t fall off sharply, so they can continue to support the Bitcoin protocol.
Since the 2020 halving, miners’ profits have hovered around 1,000 BTC per day. The majority of this comes from the block subsidy of 900 BTC per day. Meanwhile, revenue from transaction fees is consistently fluctuating between 75 to 125 BTC a day.
As Decrypt reported, miners have also upped their sales of Bitcoin since the cryptocurrency started its ongoing price rally.