The coronavirus outbreak has produced a significant impact on various industries, and crypto markets are no exception. Besides massive market fluctuations as the most visible part of these effects, the coronavirus pandemic has equally affected the coin mining industry. The recent Bitcoin price drop pushed smaller mining farms with a more expensive machine and power costs out of business, potentially causing even more centralized market in the long run.

According to data gathered by Finanso.se, the five leading Bitcoin mining pools reached 66% market share this year. With an 18.6% share in total hash rate distribution, the Chinese mining pool giant F2Pool ranked as the leading name of the global mining industry.

Chinese Crypto Mining Giants Dominate the Industry

Mining pools are groups of cooperating miners who agree to share block rewards in proportion to their contributed mining hash power. The primary task of miners is to support, legitimate, and monitor the crypto network and its blockchain.

Compared by geography, statistics show that all five leading mining pools are based in China. Behind the leading F2Pool, the Beijing-based multi-currency mining pool Poolin ranked in second place with 16.8% market share., revealed the Statista data.

Bitmain`s BTC.com ranked third with a 12.6% share in total hash rate distribution. AntPool and BTC.com follow with 11.5% and 6.6% market share, respectively.

The upcoming Bitcoin “halving” in May 2020 could make it even harder for small farms to compete with these crypto mining giants, as the mining rewards are expected to be cut in half.

Mining Revenue Rising After Fall in March

Although the coronavirus outbreak and the recent price crash cut down the profit of the leading mining pools, they’re still running profitably compared to smaller mining farms. Statistics show that by the end of the first week in March, global miners’ profits per day, including coinbase block rewards and transaction fees paid to miners, hit over $18 million. The noticeable downsizing trend continued in the next weeks, with daily revenue halving and falling to $8.1 million on March 20th.

April brought a recovery, with miners’ revenue per day growing to $14.5 million in the third week of this month.

A daily number of transactions has also been hit by a negative trend, falling from 330.000 to 265.000 between March 15th and April 15th. At the beginning of this week, the total number of confirmed daily transactions jumped to over 323.000 globally.