Canadian bitcoin miner Hive Blockchain (HIVE) earned about 184 BTC ($3.1 million) by curtailing its power use in December, whereas it mined the equivalent of 213.8 BTC.

HIVE’s December update showed that the company earned $3.15 million in income from its energy price hedging and grid balancing strategy, as well as Bitcoin mining in December. Based on the daily Bitcoin prices in December, the income from grid balancing could be equivalent to approximately 184 mined Bitcoin.

Hive mines Bitcoin and other tokens using a combination of specialized ASICs and general-purpose GPUs. When energy demand is high, miners may reduce power usage and sell excess electricity back to the grid to mitigate market challenges that have led some in the industry to file for bankruptcy. Hive converts mined alt-coins to Bitcoin.

Hive’s monthly output was down about 20% or 50 BTC. However, Hive’s grid balancing activities more than made up for the difference.

Hive stock, like the broader crypto market, was up 2.2% in pre-market trading on the day.

On December 22, 2022, HIVE installed approximately 2,050 of the 3,570 Bitmain S19j Pro miners announced. These machines arrived in the last week of December, and the HIVE team anticipates that all 3,570 S19j Pro miners will be installed by January 13, 2023.

Additionally, the mining company has deployed 1,423 of its own self-designed machines called Buzzminers, which use Intel’s Blocksale chips. The company plans to ship a total of 5,800 Buzzminers, totalling 620 petahash/second of computing power, by the end of January.

We are very happy to be producing over 213 Bitcoin this month, while also earning over USD $3 million this month from our grid balancing and energy sale initiatives. HIVE was the first public crypto mining company to set up an energy price hedging and grid balancing strategy.

says Frank Holmes, Executive Chairman of HIVE.

HIVE’s strategy for holding or selling Bitcoin varies, with some companies choosing to hold all of their Bitcoin and sell shares to cover costs, while others sell all of their Bitcoin to fund operations. HIVE has a hybrid approach and may sell digital assets to expand the business when opportunities arise while also maintaining a core investment in digital assets.