Binance Wants to Consolidate Its Bitcoin Hash Rate to Russia and Central Asia

Cryptocurrency exchange giant Binance is planning to consolidate its Bitcoin mining hash rate within the Russian and Central Asian regions.

BitRiver partnership

On Friday, BitRiver and Binance announced that the crypto exchange will deploy a physical server node for the BitRiver pool. It is the largest Bitcoin mining hosting provider in Russia, located in Bratsk. Miners in Bratsk who choose to switch to the Binance server could get a better connection as well as direct access to its own mining pool.

Binance will be gaining more exposure and get access to customers already associated with BitRiver. The mining hosting provider is currently operating at a 70-megawatt capacity. However, its full capacity is 100 megawatts at the moment.

Russian miners growing slowly

A recent map of Bitcoin mining facilities from the Center for Alternative Finance at the University of Cambridge suggests that the existing average hash rate of Russian miners has grown from 5.93% in September 2019 to 6.08% this month. Kazakhstan miners are also growing their capacity. In Q3 last year, they contributed 1.42% to the overall hash rate which has now grown to 3.14%. The Chinese hash rate has dropped from 75% in Q3 2019 to about 71% now. However, Chinese dominance in crypto hash rates continues. At least 9 out of 10 of the largest Bitcoin mining pools are owned by crypto exchanges that have a strong Chinese base or are operated by homegrown Chinese firms.

Going by the assumption that BitRiver is using sophisticated miners, like the Bitmain AntMiner S17s with an efficiency of 50 watts per terahash second (W/T), the total BitRiver Bitcoin mining farm could easily boast of a total hash rate of 1,000 petahash per second (PH/s). This is barely 1% of the total hash rate of the Bitcoin network. However, the deal with BitRiver could be the highlight of Binance’s plan to expand its bitcoin mining ambitions across the globe.

BitRiver CEO Igor Runets commented on the partnership and said,

“Binance Pool offers a highly competitive fee structure to institutional-scale miners, who are the customers of our data center.”

The firm expects about 50% of its hash rate to switch to Binance Pool.