Chinese crypto miners are dumping GPUs on secondhand trading site
Chinese crypto miners have started dumping used graphic processing units (GPUs) on the secondhand market following China's bitcoin mining crackdown.
Over the past one and half months, there has been an increasing number of new posts for selling stacks of GPUs on Xianyu, which is one of the largest marketplace apps in China for secondhand goods and is owned by Alibaba.
The screen recording made by The Block shows one such post along with dozens of similar ads recommended at the end of the page, most of which have been put up since mid-May.
Although the Chinese State Council's crackdown comment was specifically about bitcoin trading and mining activities, provincial governments have targeted the broader crypto mining sector by ordering power plants to cut their supplies to "virtual currency mining" farms. (Here's a timeline of the series of regulatory events that resulted in a spiking supply of bitcoin ASIC miners in the secondhand market.)
As a result, GPU mining farms have also been affected even though they are less energy-intensive than bitcoin mining facilities. Most notably, Ethereum's hash rate has also dropped by over 20% since China's crackdown comment in May as mining firms went offline. A lot of the hashing power on the Ethereum network relied on GPUs in addition to the Ethash ASIC miners.
