Chinese Officials Seize 10,000+ Ethereum Mining Equipment In Inner Mongolia

Officials in Inner Mongolia have confiscated more than 10,000 cryptocurrency mining equipment in the recent Chinese crackdown on crypto. The Chinese authorities imposed a ban on cryptocurrency mining activities on Friday. The current raid is the foremost carried out by China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) ever since announcement on Friday.

Officials in Inner Mongolia got information about a crypto mining activity at a retail park warehouse on Monday. When they raided the location, they found 10,100 mining rigs, which they took. Significantly, all cryptocurrency mining activities in China have been declared unlawful, irrespective of the kind of energy used.

Cryptocurrency mining is a high-energy process that has resulted in outages in nations such as Iraq. As a result, the NDRC cautioned that it will begin tracking energy usage levels throughout the nation in order to identify miners. According to official media, the seized company had a power usage of 1,104kW/h. Authorities have yet to reveal which cryptocurrency is being mined at the facility.

The electricity usage and count of rigs, on the other hand, indicate to Ethereum Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) miners. Previous restrictions focused on publicly traded mining corporations, while smaller enterprises managed to go under the radar.

Authorities, on the other hand, are now making stronger efforts to uncover all mining farms in accordance with the government’s order. Sparkpool has chosen to suspend its Ethereum mining services in order to avoid a conflict with these authorities. The service suspension affects all of its Ethereum mining pool services, both domestic and foreign. Furthermore, the Hangzhou-based business, which is the world’s second-largest Ethereum mining pool, announced a complete shutdown on September 30.

In the meantime, the real-time Ethereum hash rate has dropped by more than 8% in the last 24 hours as a result of Sparkpool’s shutdown. Furthermore, Huobi, one of China’s top exchanges by daily traded volume, was compelled to withdraw from the area.

By the end of 2021, the exchange will terminate all current China-based user accounts. All of this demonstrates the seriousness of China’s countrywide crackdown. Not a while ago, the nation dominated Bitcoin mining activities and was unrivaled on a global scale. As the group of miners in China shrank, Bitcoin mining activities became more lucrative for the remaining miners.
In May, the difficulty of mining bitcoin fell to around 30% for the first time in history.

Nevertheless, as time passed, miners fled China and established themselves in nicer locales such as Northern America and neighboring Kazakhstan. According to reports, the FUD generated by China’s revised inspection of cryptoassets has had minimal impact on institutional investors.

Furthermore, Bitcoin and the broader cryptocurrency market are slowly rebounding from Friday’s price drop. Ethereum dropped to a low of $2,750 on Friday, but was trading at $2,922 at the time of writing.