Record number of ASIC miners imported into Russia: report

An unidentified client for BitRiver has recently shipped roughly 20,000 ASIC miners into the firm’s block reward mining facility in Siberia, according to Kommersant.

The block reward mining equipment has an estimated value of $40 million to $60 million. The imported hardware’s total mining power amounts to 70 MWh of additional hashing power on the BTC network amid a massive price rise in the BTC financial market.

The client had the mining equipment delivered last December by 14 trucks. All the hardware came from Asia. BitRiver founder and CEO Igor Runets told Kommersant that the data center’s staff immediately set it up and put it into production to mine BTC.

BitRiver did not disclose the exact name of the hardware supplier or the specification of the equipment imported. Most likely, modern ASIC servers were purchased. Runets said they launched a separate hangar for the client as a separate tier-III level data center in Bratsk.

Industry watchers call this shipment the largest single batch for the Russian Federation. According to some estimates, the equipment can provide three months of operation for the blockchain mining market in Russia, a month in the U.S. and Canada, or a week in China.

Russia currently ranks third globally in digital currency mining because of the low price of electricity and surplus capacity. It accounts for 6.9% of global blockchain mining capacity. The future of the country’s blockchain mining sector remains uncertain since there is no clear regulatory framework for the industry.

Russian law on digital financial assets (DFA) came into being at the beginning of the year. So far, it bypasses the activities of block reward miners, focusing instead on issuing tokens. That lax oversight can easily change in the future. Experts note that the mysterious client likely had “permission at a high level” before deciding to take the risk to import and deploy the equipment.

See also: TAAL’s Jerry Chan presentation at CoinGeek Live, The Shift from Bitcoin “Miners” to “Transaction Processors”