The Lone Star State of Texas is now the number-one U.S. state for Bitcoin mining, dwarfing rivals by hosting a whopping 28.5% of the nation’s hash rate.
The estimate comes from Foundry, the world’s largest Bitcoin mining pool, which aggregated and published data sourced directly from its users. Back in 2021, the firm estimated that the Texas hash rate share was 8.4%.
While still comparatively high, it was still surpassed at the time by states like New York (9.5%) and Georgia (34.2%), whose respective shares have fallen to 8.8% and 9.6%.
Georgia’s steep drop was partly due to a large miner from the 2021 sample not participating in the 2023 map—but was also partly driven by growth in Texas. Meanwhile, New York’s mining growth has been stagnant since a memorandum against fossil fuel-powered miners took effect last year.
Other states like Nebraska, North Carolina, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Washington also experienced major drops.
On Texas’s part, the state has made mining attractive through government incentives designed to encourage miners to help stabilize the electricity grid. When stressed to its peak during intense summers and winters, the grid operator, ERCOT, asks miners to stop operations and leave available power for citizens in their homes, then compensates firms later for their participation.
In a press release earlier this month, Riot CEO Jason Les noted that the state’s power credits “significantly lower Riot’s
cost to mine Bitcoin.” The firm now has major expansion plans in Navarro and Milam counties, after rival Cipher Mining purchased 11,000 mining machines for its Texas facility in May.
Foundry has also expanded its own operations within Texas, acquiring mining sites from the bankruptcy estate of Compute North, a mining firm that collapsed due to bear market pressure last year.
Since Foundry’s data was sourced in July, a period of major curtailment for the region’s miners, the company now believes its 28.5% estimate may be low.
The University of Cambridge also publishes public data on Bitcoin hash rate and electricity consumption, though its mining map hasn’t been updated since January 2022. The current version shows Texas holding just 11.2% of US hash rate.
In an email to Decrypt, Cambridge Research Lead for Digital Assets Climate Impact Alexander Neumueller said his team hopes to update their mining map by “early next year,” but could not provide a definitive date.
“When we publish an update, what is very important to us is to ensure a large enough sample size and no single pool constituting an overly large part of the sample,” he explained. So far, Cambridge has onboarded ANTPOOL to its list of collaborating pools—the second largest pool after Foundry.
“Personally, the large increase in Texas’s share does not come as a surprise given conversations I have had with industry stakeholders,” he added. “I expect that the landscape today looks noticeably different than our last data point in January 2022, particularly with respect to China and Kazakhstan.”