Bitcoin Halving Harm Miners? Crypto Compact Down

NewYork – The crypto market experienced a decline today, Friday (17/5/2024) after the bitcoin halving which affected miners’ income.

Referring to CoinMarketCap on Friday (17/5/2024) at 06:45 WIB, the crypto market weakened. Bitcoin fell 1.62% to US$65,291.18 even though it was in the positive zone of 3.81% on a weekly basis.

Ethereum was in the red zone 3.09% in the last 24 hours and fell 2.84% in a week. BNB experienced a daily depreciation of 2.31% and fell 4.33% weekly.

Likewise, Dogecoin is in negative territory 4.15% in the last 24 hours and in the last seven days has experienced a depreciation of 0.91%.

CoinDesk Market Index (CMI), which is an index to measure the market capitalization-weighted performance of the digital asset market, fell 1.53% to 2,534.38. Open interest depreciated 1.12% to US$58.73 billion.

Meanwhile, the fear & greed index reported by coinmarketcap.com shows the number 61, which shows that the market is in a neutral phase with the current economic conditions and crypto industry.

Quoted from coindesk.com, the current hashrate and power consumption on the Bitcoin (BTC) network implies an estimated mining cost of around US$45,000, down from above US$50,000, said JPMorgan (JPM) in a research report yesterday (16/5/ 2024).

JPM said previously it anticipated a significant drop in hashrate after the halving as unprofitable miners exit the network.

This is now happening but with some delays. The quadrennial halving, which slows the growth rate of bitcoin supply as miner rewards are cut by 50%, occurred last month.

For information, hashrate is the total combined computing power used to mine and process transactions on the blockchain.

The reason for the delay was likely due to the launch of the Runes protocol, a new form of token creation on the network, which triggered a temporary spike in transaction fees, the report said.

“This provided a temporary boost to miner revenues immediately following the bitcoin halving,” wrote analysts led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou.

“Despite the influence of Runes, this increase from Runes has proven to be short-lived with user activity and costs dropping drastically over the last week or two,” the report said.