Canada-based Bitcoin (BTC) mining firm Bitfarms has announced cost-cutting measures and staff reductions in response to the ongoing COVID-19 (coronavirus) crisis.

The blockchain infrastructure company runs one of North America’s largest Bitcoin (BTC) operations, and despite the worsening pandemic-induced economic crisis, says it is “well positioned to absorb short-term economic changes and maintain long term viability.”

In response to the growing COVID-19 crisis, Bitfarms says it has implemented temporary staff cuts and cost-saving measures, aimed at reducing monthly general and administrative expenses by approximately 20% to 25%.

Discussing the news interim CEO and Chief Strategy Officer at Bitfarms, Emiliano Grodzki, said:

“Cryptocurrency mining is essential to the Bitcoin blockchain and given the self-incentivized model upon which Bitcoin mining works, we firmly believe that the combination of network difficulty and Bitcoin price will continue to adjust to ensure profitability for mining for the largest and most efficient miners.

“Our strategy has always been to be a leader amongst our peers in efficiency and we are pleased to see that, despite the challenges to traditional markets, our scale and quality of operations has allowed us to continue to generate positive cash flow in these difficult times.”

From the significant price drop of Bitcoin (BTC) on 12 March 2020, until the price recovery at around USD $6K on 19 March 2020, Bitfarms says it maintained an average daily hashrate of approximately 630 petahash per second (PH). Since then it has maintained around 750 PH.

AYO.NEWS says:

Though many had expected Bitcoin (BTC) to emerge as a safe haven asset during the COVID-19 crisis, up until now this clearly hasn’t happened, and with the BTC halving scheduled for May, things could get even more challenging for mining operations.

There is, of course, also the possibility that, if the crisis goes on for an extended length of time, we may see critical infrastructure failures of things like power grids (due to staff shortages leading to maintenance or administrative issues, or civil disorder), which would be very bad news for miners.

However, yesterday we reported that London-listed Argo Blockchain, which also has Canadian mining operations, remains upbeat despite the current challenges.

AYO.NEWS says features the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pentagon Digital Limited.

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