Does China Still Control 21% Of Bitcoin Mining Hashrate Globally? New Data Highlights

• Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, or CCAF’s collected data, China still accounts for a considerable Bitcoin mining hashrate. 

• The country banned cryptocurrencies and their mining last year and remained a vehement critic of digital assets. 

• This raises scepticism as to how China accounted for the mining hashrate and how it surged within a month. 

According to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, or CCAF, which collected data from September 2021 to January 2022 for their latest study on Bitcoin mining hashrate. 

And it has highlighted something that raises questions about the Chinese crackdown on cryptocurrencies and their mining. According to the CCAF’s numbers, the US has remained at the forefront of Bitcoin mining and extended its leading position accounting for 37.84%. And ironically, China has re-emerged as a primary mining hub with 21.11%, Kazakhstan with 13.22%, Canada with 6.48%, and Russia with 4.66%. 

And this raises scepticism as to how when, following the ban, the mining activity plunged to almost zero and suddenly surged to 21%. 

Still, the reported hashrate all of a sudden spiked back to 30.47 EH/s in the month of September last year, instantly positioning China in second place worldwide regarding installed mining capacity.

The report actually contemplates what happened because a comeback of this degree within a single month would seem rare given the physical constraints because this takes time to find current or develop new non-traceable hosting facilities at that scale. And the hypothesis was that the underground miners might be utilizing VPNs to hide their location and then, suddenly, decided that they were safe enough to stop hiding, which seems near impossible.

These numbers were presented directly from the Cambridge Digital Assets Programme (CDAP); the CCAF hosted the CDAP in partnership with sixteen significant private and public institutions. Among them, they find the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Mastercard, Visa, and the World Bank.

Last year, China banned the asset class, but it still utilizes the underlying technology as China continues to expand into the blockchain space. Recently, South Korean Internet giant Kakao’s public Blockchain Klaytn highlighted that it would participate in establishing a permissioned version of Klaytn called Chongqing Chain. And this intends to be a path into the blockchain space of China. 

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