Bitcoin (BTC) mining companies with high-performance computing (HPC) exposure underperformed the world’s largest cryptocurrency for the third month in a row in April, Wall Street bank JPMorgan said in a research report on Thursday.
Some bitcoin miners have pivoted into new business areas, such as offering HPC services to the fast growing artificial intelligence (AI) market, to reduce their dependence on crypto.
“We note miners with HPC exposure (IREN, RIOT, WULF, HUT) underperformed BTC performance for the third consecutive month,” analysts Reginald Smith and Charles Pearce wrote.
Mining profitability fell in April as the network hashrate increased.
Daily block reward revenue declined 6% from March, the bank said, while the monthly average hashrate rose around 56 exahashes per second (EH/s), or 6% month-on-month, to 872 EH/s in April.
“This was the second largest sequential increase in the monthly average network hashrate on record,” the authors wrote.
The hashrate refers to the total combined computational power used to mine and process transactions on a proof-of-work blockchain, and is a proxy for competition in the industry and mining difficulty.
The total market cap of the 13 U.S.-listed mining stocks that the bank tracks increased 12% from March.
Greenidge (GREE) was a notable outperformer in April with a 46% gain.
Read more: Bitcoin Miner 1Q Results May Disappoint as Hashprice Fell, Tariffs Hit: CoinShares