A top online sports lottery service provider in China which recently agreed to accept Bitcoin or USD for the issuance and sales of its company’s newly-issued Class A ordinary shares has hinted on its developing blockchain-related business with a planned purchase of up to 15,900 Bitcoin mining machines this year.

500.com says it has entered into a definitive purchase agreement worth RMB55.2 million (approximately US$8.5 million) for the equipment whose delivery is expected by Q2 2021 and another framework agreement to buy  10,000 more if available. It did not specify its prospective supplier(s).

Upon full delivery, the 15,900 mining machines are expected to increase the company’s total hash rate by approximately 1,000 petahashes per second (PH/S).

Also planning a major delivery is North American digital mining operator, Core Scientific, which announced it is expecting Canaan’s supply of 6,000 units of its A1246 model of AvalonMiners.

The machines are to be deployed across Core Scientific’s US-based data centers starting March 2021 and boosting its ASIC mining capabilities by over 400 MW of power under contract. 

“Growing demand for digital mining hardware has forced manufacturers to adapt as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact global supply chains,” said Nangeng Zhang, CEO and Chairman of Canaan on their support for the mining operator in North America.

“Mainstream adoption of digital asset investment is increasing exponentially, with large public companies and financial institutions looking for exposure to the sector at an accelerated rate,” the CEO of Core Scientific, Kevin Turner, said. He added that they need to increase their fleet to address the demand hence their work with Canaan to help meet this goal. 

Meanwhile, in the midst of this growing interest in the mining sector, a new Glassnode analysis of Bitcoin distribution across network participants shows that Bitcoin ownership has spread over time. The crypto analytics firm notes that Bitcoin ownership is much less concentrated than often reported. 

The analysis seeks to address a claim by some publications including a recent report by Bloomberg which states that “2% of accounts control 95% of all Bitcoin” – though they later derived that around 2% of network entities control 71.5% of all Bitcoin. He finds that a problem with the reports is that “they analyze the distribution of BTC across network addresses. This leads to misleading statistics, which result in false narratives around BTC ownership among stakeholders.”

As of January 2021, a summary of the Bitcoin supply distribution across all categories to include whales and humpbacks as the biggest non-exchange entities that together control around 31% of the Bitcoin supply. 

“These are most likely institutions, funds, custodians, OTC desks, and other high net worth individuals.,” the firm notes. “On the other hand, smaller entities holding up 50 BTC each (shrimp, crab, and octopus) control almost 23% of the supply. This shows that a substantial amount of bitcoins are in the hands of retail investors.”

Since 2020, it says the supply held by whales and humpbacks increased 13.4%, and their number by more than 27% to over 2,160 whale entities.

It adds that there has been a significant increase in the number of whales and the supply they hold going by their recent supply increase and the rise in the absolute number of whale entities. Other factors considered include that the Bitcoin supply stored in exchange wallets is at its lowest level since almost 2.5 years.