CoinTerra is best known for it’s TerraMiner line of high-powered ASIC miners, but starting today the Austin-based company is moving into an entirely new market: Hosted mining contracts. The company is offering a range of plans from 200 GH/s to a little over 1 PH/s. Prices for a 12-month mining contract start at $999.
Given that CoinTerra’s mining hardware already powers an estimated 15% of the bitcoin network, the move appears to be an attempt to expand, and perhaps diversify, the company’s income sources. With bitcoin difficulty climbing and a new generation of ASICs already coming to market, Cointerra is in a great position to leverage its existing stock of hardware with the move.
In the blog post about the new offering, CEO Ravi Iyengar said that another motivation for the contract-mining service was to provide access to mining services.
“Many prospective Bitcoin miners don’t have the space or power requirements to operate their own Bitcoin mining hardware, especially at scale. In addition, some foreign countries have import restrictions on advanced cryptocurrency hardware or punitively high duties, but our new mining contracts truly enable mining without borders.”
Another interpretation of the move comes from the Wall Street Journal’s MoneyBeat blog, which noted:
In September 2013, the entire mining network reached the 1 petahash/second rate, a multiple of 40 times higher than in January 2013. Now CoinTerra will be selling 1 petahash contracts. It’s gotten so big, it’s harder to mine profitably on anything but a very large scale. CoinTerra itself saw sales drop 30% in April. Thus the move into cloud mining.
Should the move to mining contracts prove profitable for CoinTerra, other mining hardware makers may suit follow suit.