Disruptions in coal plants in Xinjiang and other parts of China have knocked out bitcoin miners in the region, clipping as much as 35 exahashes from the Bitcoin system’s global hashrate, CoinDesk has learned.

Figures shared with CoinDesk show F2Pool, Antpool, BTC.com and Poolin, the four largest pools in the world, have collectively lost 86% of their share of Bitcoin’s global hashrate over the last 24 hours. Primitive Ventures partner Dovey Wan, who operates mining equipment in one of the regions, told CoinDesk the coal-fired plants are down after “a massive explosion under the plants.”

The coal plant shutdowns follow coal mine accidents in Shanxi, Xinjiang and Guizhou provinces, which collectively have left nearly a dozen dead and, in the case of the mine in Xinjian, 21 people trapped. Coal-abundant Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia are popular spots for Chinese bitcoin miners in the autumn and winter, when the rains that usually supply cheap hydro energy in regions like Sichuan are low.

The incident highlights how much of bitcoin mining is still confined to China, but given Bitcoin’s design, it should only cause minor delays for Bitcoin block times for the next couple of weeks (if at all).

Bitcoin mining profitability stable

Bitcoin’s hashrate is a lagging indicator that measures the collective energy input and work output of the network. The self-reported hashrate of all mining pools is currently around 128 exahashes per second, according to mining pool APIs, down from 165 exahashes for the Bitcoin network’s seven-day moving average.

Luxor Mining CFO Ethan Vera said the outages currently have “no effect on the profitability of miners,” but that we would see the ramifications of this event during Bitcoin’s next difficulty adjustment, which could happen later than expected on May 1, Vera said. He expects Bitcoin’s difficulty to drop in response to the slower block times the network will experience with these miners offline.

Hashrate is a metric for gauging the amount of power being used to mine bitcoin. Consequently, Bitcoin’s difficulty, a self-contained score that deems how easy or hard it is to mine bitcoin based on how much hashrate is on the network, hit another all-time high yesterday. 

“Network difficulty adjusted yesterday, so the next adjustment is not scheduled for another 14 days,” Vera explained. 

“If the hashrate [in Xinjiang] remains offline, it means we will find blocks less frequently than the target (every 10 min) and that will have some downward pressure on next difficulty adjustment. So it really depends on how long this outage lasts to determine how big of an impact it will have on mining profitability,” said Vera.

A miner who spoke to The Block estimated the mining farms in the region “should resume in about a week from now.”

• Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $61,822.06 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Slipping 2.62% over the previous 24 hours.
• Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $60,033.53-$63,850.25 (CoinDesk 20)
• BTC trades between its 10-hour and 50-hour averages on the hourly chart, a sideways signal for market technicians.

Bitcoin’s slowly recovering from the news of Turkey’s coming cryptocurrency payment ban, which caused the No. 1 cryptocurrency by market capitalization to drop to near $60,000 before U.S. markets opened on Friday. The ban would take effect on April 30.

“Today’s weakness is mostly attributed to accelerated profit taking after news hit that Turkey bans crypto payments,” Edward Moya, senior market analyst at OANDA, told CoinDesk in an email. “The biggest fear for many crypto traders has always been that big governments might impose harsh restrictions on cryptocurrencies.”

The profit-taking behavior was also observed in the trading activity where the daily trading volume on eight spot exchanges tracked by CoinDesk went up from the prior day.

“The situation in Turkey is rather unique given the government is doing everything in their power to stabilize their currency,” Moya said. “Many on Wall Street believe that the lira is poised to fall over 10% in the short term, and that is forcing Turkey to impose capital controls and now also slow down liras going into bitcoin.”

Speaking on CoinDesk TV’s “First Mover” show on Friday, CoinDesk Global Macro Editor Emily Parker said: “Crypto cannot really be stopped. You can make it a lot harder to access, but no government has been able to successfully shut down crypto entirely.”

Ether and altcoins

• Ether (ETH) trading around $2,433.00 as of 20:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Slipping 2.48% over the previous 24 hours.
• Ether’s 24-hour range: $2,306.59-$2,547.94 (CoinDesk 20)
• Ether trades between its 10-hour and 50-hour averages on the hourly chart, a sideways signal for market technicians.

Ether was moving in tandem with bitcoin Friday after logging a new record-high price above $2,500 a day ago in the wake of the Berlin hard fork upgrade implementation.

Meanwhile, the star of altcoins on Friday is dogecoin (DOGE), the meme token born as a joke in 2013.

At press time, dogecoin was changing hands at $0.35, up 160.67% in the past 24 hours.

DOGE’s trading volume is another sign of bullish sentiment around the Shiba Inu-represented cryptocurrency, the most traded cryptocurrency on centralized exchanges in the past 24 hours, according to CryptoCompare. 

According to IntoTheBlock’s newsletter on Friday, the number of addresses holding dogecoin for less than a month reached a record high in February and continued to go up in both March and April.

The U.S.-based crypto exchange giant Coinbase, which went public this week, still has not listed dogecoin, despite the high demand.

“With the WallStreetBets and GameStop saga setting a distinct anti-Wall Street tone among retail investors, DOGE, as an almost ‘anti-crypto,’ seems to have caught many imaginations,” Richard Delaney, senior content writer at OKEx Insights, told CoinDesk, referring to the Reddit forum “Set in this context, heavy promotion from the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Cuban and an army of YouTube and TikTok influencers are fueling the current dogecoin mania.”

But as Du Jun, co-founder of another popular crypto exchange, Huobi, warned, there are risks around the beloved meme token. Despite the growing interest from new investors, DOGE holders are still highly concentrated within the top 10 addresses, which counts about 41.35% of all circulating dogecoin.

Read More: Coinbase Misses Out on Dogecoin Listing as Meme Token Rallies 6,000%+ on Binance

Other digital assets on the CoinDesk 20 are mostly in the red Friday. Notable winners as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET):

• ethereum classic (ETC) + 39.07%
• bitcoin cash (BCH) + 22.59%
• litecoin (LTC) + 9.3%
• eos (EOS) + 7%

Notable losers:

• xrp (XRP) - 7.9%
• 0x (ZRX) - 5.79%
• algorand (ALGO) - 4.12%
• stellar (XLM) - 3.47%
• kyber network (KNC) - 3.16%
• chainlink (LINK) - 3.05%

Other markets

Equities:

• Asia’s Nikkei 225 closed 0.14% higher.
• The FTSE 100 in Europe was up by 0.52%.
• The S&P 500 in the United States closed in the green 0.36%.

Commodities:

• Crude oil (WTI): -0.57% to $63.10/barrel.
• Gold: +0.65% to $1,774.96/ounce.

Treasurys:

• The 10-year U.S. Treasury bond yield climbed Friday to 1.582%.

Austin, Texas-based cryptocurrency mining firm Blockcap mined 544 bitcoin (BTC, -1.41%) in Q1, an earnings report revealed exclusively to CoinDesk shows. Meanwhile, rival Riot, one of the largest publicly traded miners in North America, mined 491 bitcoin in the same period, per Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Blockcap’s haul follows the company’s $38 million funding round and its acquisition of 32,000 Bitmain ASICs, and Riot’s comes after the miner inked a deal for 49,000 ASICs from Bitmain in the beginning of April. Some of these mining machines are online but the bulk are not, as both Blockcap and Riot will continuing placing news ASICs online as these shipments are fulfilled throughout the year.

Publicly traded Marathon Patent Group, another mainstay on North America’s mining scene, pulled in 196 BTC in Q1 of this year. 

Each of these companies have been buying up mining rigs in a race to expand as North American investor appetite for Bitcoin’s mining has never been greater.

These mining companies, along with others like Luxor and newcomer Gryphon, have grown significantly over the past year. The United States and Canada now share anywhere from 10%-15% of Bitcoin’s global hashrate, a trend that could continue with investment dollars pouring into North American mining firms.

“Blockcap has an aggressive growth strategy that is designed to create more jobs in the blockchain industry not just in the United States but also in our home state of Texas and our hometown of Austin,” Blockcap founder and Chairman Darin Feinstein said. “We believe there is ample room for all of us to expand together and in turn provide broader, sustained economic growth at the local, state and national levels.”

An important piece of this growing industry, ASIC manufacturing, just touched down on the continent in the last year with ePIC, an ASIC manufacturer fresh off a $7 million series A funding round.

“North America could be a mining powerhouse but three key pieces need to come together for that to happen,” Henry Quan, CEO of ASIC maker ePIC, said. “There’s a lot of cheap energy here, commercial miners and a favorable political climate, so that’s the first thing. Mining pools are another piece, which we have with Luxor and DCG. And now, we have the third piece with ePIC and ASIC manufacturing.” (DCG is the parent company of CoinDesk.)

Publicly traded Marathon Patent Group, another mainstay on North America’s mining scene, pulled in 196 BTC in Q1 of this year. 

Each of these companies have been buying up mining rigs in a race to expand as North American investor appetite for Bitcoin’s mining has never been greater.