F2Pool, world’s second largest crypto mining pool based in China, has recently released an analysis that about 13 million graphics cards (GPU) have been put into crypto mining, among which 8 million are in active operation at present.

GPU miners mainly focus on ETH and ZEC before ASIC miners on the Equihash algorithm came out in July 2018. According to the hashrate peaks of ETH (290Th/s) and ZEC (500Msol/s) at the end of July 2018, it is estimated that a total of 13 million graphics cards (GPUs) have been used in crypto mining at one time. That alone is a market valued over 20 billion yuan (roughly $3 billion), plus the infrastructure construction of mines and other investments, the industry scale of GPU mining is huge.

The total number of graphics cards put into mining, assuming all graphics cards are RX470 or GTX 1060 (two most popular GPUs)

However, the profits from ZEC mining is rather low after the rollout of Equihash-based ASIC miners, so graphics cards for ZEC mining are neglected for its small number in the calculation. Based on the hashrate of the GPU-mined coins with the highest yields (ETH, Grin, Beam, and RVN), F2Pool comes to the conclusion that there are around 8 million graphics cards in actual working.

The number of mining graphics cards in active working, assuming all graphics cards are RX470 or GTX 1060 (two most popular GPUs)

It can be seen that more than 30% of mining-focused graphics cards have been phased out from the mining market since July 2018 along with the slump of crypto price. The 5 million graphics cards have been resold to internet café, game players, or packed waiting for running again in future.

While it is foreseeable that after the advent of the rainy season (usually starting in May), more low-cost mines will be put into operation, and the profits from mining will pick up to some extent. Those dust-laden graphics card will be awakened and put back into mining.

The report also points out that Grin-29 is currently the best cryptocurrency to mine with GTX 1060, which outperforms other mainstream GPU-mined coins including ETH, RVN, Beam and Aion. For RX470/570 miners, ETH pays best, followed by Beam, Grin-29, RVN, Aion.

F2Pool, is the world’s second largest bitcoin mining pool and world’s fourth largest ETH mining pool by block output, according to real-time statistics from BTC.com.