The Japanese technology giant GMO is quitting the crypto mining hardware business. The cryptocurrency market has been falling and affecting sales of mining hardware from other companies. The information was released in a press release by GMO Internet, Inc. last week.
GMO Quits the Crypto Mining Hardware Business
The current bear market has affected the whole cryptocurrency industries. Several companies had to take special measures to avoid further problems since the most important virtual currencies fell more than 80% since their all-time high.
In a meeting of the Board of Directors that was held on December 25, the company decided to leave the crypto mining market.
The press release reads as follows:
“GMO Internet, Inc. resolved at the meeting of the Board of Directors held today to post an extraordinary loss in the cryptocurrency mining business for the fourth quarter (October 1, 2018, to December 31, 2018) of the fiscal year ending December 2018. These numbers are approximate values and may fluctuate, affected by the exchange rate.”
The crypto mining industry has been heavily affected by the bear trend in the crypto space. Since August, Bitcoin’s hash rate fell around 50% and it is just starting to recover after one of the largest difficulty drops in history. Now, Bitcoin’s hash rate is close to 40 million TH/s.
According to data provided by the company, they show consolidated and non-consolidated losses for the last quarter of 2018 close to $321 million and $344 million respectively. Although the company will be shutting down its mining hardware sales, the firm will continue with its in-house mining operations.
The company did not have a long presence in the mining market. GMO started to develop and sell mining hardware back in September 2017 when the crypto market was reaching new highs and the bull trend was being shaped. In August 2018, the firm did not offer support to Bitcoin Cash and it focused only on Bitcoin mining.
As the prices of virtual currencies fell during the whole year, the hash rate increased and so difficulty, mining companies saw themselves in a difficult situation. The costs increased substantially, and in some cases, some smaller miners left the market. Indeed, there are some reports that show that around 800,000 unprofitable miners left the space.
A few weeks ago, Bitmain, the largest company in the mining industry, closed its office in Israel. This office was opened back in 2016 and explored meaningful use cases of blockchain technology.
