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The cryptocurrency and blockchain industry exploded onto the tech scene in 2017 in a way we had never seen before.

At the start of 2017, the market cap of the entire cryptocurrency industry was around $18 billion, but near the start of 2018, it had exploded to over $800 billion. Before 2017, very few people knew about blockchain technology or cryptocurrency, and that seemingly changed overnight.

The leader of the pack and the largest beneficiary of this growth was Bitcoin, which is the largest and most popular crypto asset on the market. Like many other coins, Bitcoin is “mined”. Mining crypto involves validating transactions via use of computing power and, if successful, miners get new cryptocurrency as a reward.

In the past, mining cryptocurrency was incredibly profitable. As such, many people and companies built giant mining farms worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to capitalize on the opportunity.

While mining cryptocurrency was a great way to make money for a while, this is starting to become less true by the day.

The Problem for Miners

Over the last few months, the cryptocurrency industry has been on a steady decline. While it is still much higher than it was at the start of 2017, the market cap has fallen to barely over $200 billion at the time of writing this article. As you could imagine, this has severely hurt those miners and mining farms that relied on the success of these coins.

Mining a single Bitcoin today costs about $6,000 in computing expenses, and with the current price of Bitcoin only being a few hundred dollars more than that, there is virtually no profit to be made.

This is a far cry from the thousands of dollars miners were making from each mined Bitcoin in early 2018. Naturally, this is causing a lot of stress and worry amongst those with massive and expensive mining rigs in operation.

Is the Cryptocurrency Market’s Decline Over?

While the market has taken a lot of hits throughout the latter half of 2018, many people believe the decline will only continue. If this is the case, it could spell disaster for cryptocurrency miners. If the price of Bitcoin drops to $5,000 or lower, they will essentially be spending $1,000 to mine a Bitcoin.

At that point, it simply wouldn’t be worthwhile or viable to mine Bitcoin anymore as miners would be losing money hand over fist. These miners would still have all the infrastructure and computing power, just sitting there costing them money.

While they could opt to sell their machinery, they would often lose a lot of money in that scenario as very few people are in the market for that kind of computing power—not to mention the asset’s depreciation.

But instead of selling everything off and settling for a loss, there might be a better way for miners to not only keep their machines, but also get back to making a profit with them.

Profitable Below the Break-Even Price

While cryptocurrency mining requires computing power, so do a variety of other tasks. For example, there is a dramatic rise in the growth of artificial intelligence (AI), and this will require a lot more computing power in order to be handled efficiently. Without significant increases in compute power, the growth of AI will be hindered or stunted.

Thankfully, there are platforms out there that allow for people or organizations to sell their unused computing capacity, thereby allowing mining operations to simply shift their purpose from being cryptocurrency miners, to providers of computing power to others.

An example of such a platform is Tatau. Tatau is a blockchain-based distributed computing platform, focused on enterprises. The company unlocks non-traditional sources of compute power, such as unused computational power from mining operations.

In addition to large mining operations, anyone with some extra computing power to spare will be able to sell it on the platform. The platform uses blockchain technology to bring together the distributed resources, allowing for an exponential growth in computation. In so doing, Tatau aims to help a variety of industries and technologies that require more computing power than they currently have available or—in the case of smaller tech startups—can afford.

Blockchain is More Than Just Cryptocurrency

To many people, the ideas of cryptocurrency and blockchain go hand in hand. However, this isn’t always the case. While they are related, we are starting to see blockchain technology come out from behind the shadows of the crypto industry.

Blockchain is about so much more than cryptocurrency, and has the goal of being a faster, more secure and efficient technology than the traditional options throughout the world today.

Blockchain technology has use cases in a number of different industries such as healthcare, supply chain management, IT, and many more. Some industries have already begun implementing it, while others remain interested.

As a result, truly innovative solutions to industry-wide problems shouldn’t rely on a sky-high crypto market. Instead, they should reap the benefits of blockchain technology without being affected by the volatility of the markets.

No matter the market condition, platforms like Tatau and others provide ways for miners to remain profitable and put their expensive infrastructure to good use.