As the price of Litecoin (LTC) surges dramatically since the Lunar New Year celebrations in early February, the Bitcoin mining giant Bitmain jumps at the chance to reduce its Antminer L3 inventory.

Attribute to Litecoin’s second halving which is months away, LTC has surged over 77 percent in a single month. The stakeholders, including the mining pools, mining machine manufacturers, miners, and speculators gird up their loins to make a profit from the bullish trend.

On the evening of March 7, an anonymous member in the “Litecoin Halving Warm-up” WeChat group spilled out that “Bitmain has sold 100,000 Litecoin miners today”.

According to blockchain media Odaily, the 100,000 miners sold by Bitmain is the Antminer L3. People with knowledge of the matter said:

“Bitmain issues the Antminer L3+ and L3++ shortly after the launch of the L3 miner which causes overstock of the old version miners. It is a good time for them to reduce their Antminer L3 inventory.”

He also disclosed that the selling price of the L3 miner is around 300 RMB (US$44.7). Which means this initiative could help Bitmain to recover at least 30 million yuan.

It is also worth noting that, the current computing power of Litecoin network is 248TH/s, if all the 100,000 L3 miners (250MH/s) are put into use, it will boost the whole network computing power by 8 percent, which is influential enough for speculators to cheer up.

A Chinese miner dealer Hao Fan commented that he never sell the brand new L3 miners, as this version was launched at the end of 2016 which has almost been eliminated from the market after the L3+ and L3++ miners being launched.

An insider close to the buyers of this batch of Antminer L3 disclosed that:

“Some of the buyers use these miners to mine Litecoin which others resell them. Bitmain should be thankful for the bullish trend, as they can get rid of its Litecoin miner inventory.”

The positive performance of Litecoin not only helps Bitmain to reduce its L3 inventory but also boosts the selling of all the LTC mining devices.

According to Bitmain’s official website, its miners support mining for Litecoin (Antminer L3+ and L3++) have sold out since March 7. The LTC hype facilitates a bullish consensus to attract more people to hoard the token as well as the miners for speculation.

However, the halving is only 5 months away, no one can tell if there is still much room for LTC price to surge. In addition, there is a rumor that Bitmain is going to launch its new Antminer L5 according to cloud computing platform BitDeer. Speculators should evaluate the risk of purchasing the L3 miners at this stage.