One-fifth of global Bitcoin hash rate is now controlled by listed companies

A recent report has shown that nearly one-fifth of the total share of Bitcoin’s (BTC) hash rate now belongs to publicly-listed mining companies.

The report, published by Arcane Research, details that publicly-listed Bitcoin mining companies now account for 19% of Bitcoin’s total hash rate, growing considerably from a mere 3% in January l.

The term hash rate refers to the total computing power used by a miner’s computing equipment to confirm a transaction. A higher hash rate ensures increased protection against double-spending attacks, which is the process of reversing BTC transactions over the blockchain by contributing to at least 51% of the BTC hash rate.

While there were only a small number of public mining companies at the beginning of last year, there are now a total of 26 different public companies involved in Bitcoin mining, an increase driven by the growing number of mining companies going public.

The report suggests that the growth in the number of public mining companies has been driven by public companies having greater access to capital, which allows them to expand their mining fleets faster than their private competitors.

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At present, 44.95% of the global hash rate emerges from North American miners, according to the latest data from the Cambridge Bitcoin electricity consumption index. With the massive projected increases in target hash rate among the publicly traded Bitcoin miners, this number is expected to increase, which means that the Bitcoin network will become gradually more centralized over time.

Related: Miners that hodl the most Bitcoin are ‘relentlessly expanding’

The rate of Bitcoin mining has grown substantially over the past few years as the crypto asset’s hash rate reached a new all-time high of 248.11 exahashes per second (EH/s) on Feb. 18. Currently, the network’s hash rate is at 213.16 EH/s, roughly two hundred and thirteen quintillion hashes per second.