Hashrate Index Launches ASIC Rig Price Index
ASIC rigs’ primary and secondary markets are opaque. Manufacturers release very little price and quantity data for each rig, usually only disclosed by the public companies (Canaan, Ebang) or given as one of numbers (Bitmain, Whatsminer). Secondary markets are also a mess, with most deals happening over platforms such as Telegram and WeChat. Hence, it is hard to find the true value of ASIC hardware at any given point in time.
On Hashrate Index, there is now a tracker for Rig Prices:
Methodology
While there are no public marketplaces for buying and selling ASICs, there are thousands of sellers and buyers all over the world that post publicly their bids for different rigs. We have been on a relentless mission to capture prices, volume, and terms of these deals to create the first Rig Index.
We collected the price, hashrate, and electricity usage for dozens of SHA-256 miners over time. We utilized multiple sources including forums (Bitcoin Talk, Reddit), broker-dealers (websites, Telegram channels, Discord channels, WeChat Groups), e-commerce platforms (Alibaba), manufacturers’ websites and industry reports.
Our dataset evolves on a daily basis as we continue to add historical and present data from existent and new sources. As of July, the SHA-256 Hashrate Index aggregates over 5,000 rig sales.
Rig Price Index
One of the most interesting insight that can be drawn from this data is on capex requirements over time.
The cost per TH for each bucket (efficiency or nanometers) is found by dividing the ASIC price by its compute power. By aggregating several thousand data points spanned across 3+ years we can build an index that can be used by industry professionals.
The value of a Rig is highly dependent on its ability to generate cashflows. Therefore, more efficient rigs which draw less power per unit of compute power sells at a premium. That’s why we split our data into multiple tiers based on efficiency.
Our first group of efficiency represents the latest generation of miners on the market. As of time of writing, the latest generation equipment runs in the 30 to 38 j/TH efficiency range.
We will continue to break out the first tier of miners as new miners come onto the market. We want to expand this analysis to other rigs as well, we are very close to putting together a Equihash Rig Index.
Popular Rig Prices
Have you ever wondered how individual rig prices change over time?
The S9 average price decreased 98.5% over the past couple years. In 2018 these miners were sold at 2,000 USD and nowadays we have seen trades for less than 20 USD per unit including PSU. The prices are also extremely volatile, if you bought an S9 in early 2019 you could have sold it for twice or three times as much that summer.
Rig Details
Not sure which rig to buy? Check out the rig details page that has relevant information for the most popular rigs available in the market including historical revenue since the announcement date and a curated review by the most renowned industry experts.
This is a passage from Steve’s Barbour CEO of Upstream Data review on the Antminer S9:
As someone who packs many ASICs into very dense mining enclosures that are highly exposed to extreme environments, I’d like to think I’ve seen the harshest of operating conditions. From the hot and humid Texas summer to the dry, frigid cold and windswept Saskatchewan prairie winters, the Antminer S9 has held up extremely well for all of our deployments.
And even when hardware failures occur they are relatively cheap, easy and quick to find replacement parts as the sheer mass of global deployments has made for a very robust second hand market.
Check the full review here.
Want to contribute with data or a miner review? Ping us over at Twitter.
Already a miner or interested in getting started?
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Interested in PoW Data? Check Hashrate Index where the financialization of hashrate starts.
