This news release constitutes a “designated news release” for the purposes of the Company’s prospectus supplement dated May 10, 2023 to its short form base shelf prospectus dated May 1, 2023.

Vancouver, British Columbia–(Newsfile Corp. – June 9, 2023) – HIVE Blockchain Technologies Ltd. (TSXV: HIVE) (NASDAQ: HIVE) (FSE: HBFA) (the “Company” or “HIVE”) is pleased to announce the unaudited production figures from the Company’s global Bitcoin operations for the month of May 2023, with 304.6 Bitcoin produced in May, and a current BTC HODL balance of approximately 1,950 (as at June 1^st). Additionally, the Company announces it has a treasury of 250 valuable Uncommon Satoshis mined from block rewards in our wallets. (all amounts in US dollars, unless otherwise indicated).

Summary Overview:

• HIVE produced 304.6 Bitcoin in the month of May, from ASIC and GPU mining operations, representing an average of 92.4 Bitcoin Per Exahash, with an average hashrate of 3.30 EH/s for the month of May 2023;
• HIVE produced an average of 9.8 BTC per day in May 2023;
• HIVE ended the month with 3.32 EH/s of mining capacity, including ASIC and GPU BTC hashrate.

May 2023 Production Figures

Aydin Kilic, President & CEO of HIVE, noted, “We are starting to receive shipments of our 1.26 EH/s of ASICs which was previously announced, and are installing them in our data centers upon delivery. We expect to provide updates on our growing hashrate capacity as we work towards our interim goal of 4 EH/s, and moreover, we are actively evaluating opportunities in the market for our year end goal of 6 EH/s.”

The Company’s total Bitcoin production in May 2023 was:

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• 291.4 BTC produced from ASICs from an average hashrate of 3.15 EH/s from ASICs in May;
• 9.4 BTC produced per day on average from ASICs, and 92.5 BTC/EH from ASICs in May;
• 3.32 EH/s of BTC month end Hashrate as of May 31, comprised of 3.17 EH/s of ASIC BTC hashrate and 0.15 EH/s of GPU BTC Hashrate;
• Monthly average of 3.30 EH/s, comprised of an average of 3.15 EH/s of ASIC mining capacity and average of 145 PH/s of Bitcoin GPU mining capacity during the month of May;
• This represents a 1% month over month end increase in BTC ASIC hashrate (April 30 month end was 3.14 EH/s hashrate), and a 2% month over month average decrease in BTC hashrate from ASICs and GPUs combined (April average BTC hashrate was 3.38 EH/s), due to the GPUs mining algorithm having a higher profit per megawatt hour in April.

Bitcoin Global Network Mining Difficulty Is Volatile

Network difficulty factors are a significant variable in the Company’s gross profit margins. The Bitcoin network difficulty was 48.7 trillion (“T”) as at May 1, and increased to 51.0T as at May 31, reaching a new all-time high. Accordingly, Bitcoin mining difficulty ended the month about 4.7% higher than the beginning of the month.

The Bitcoin Network Difficulty is a publicly available statistic, which reflects the total number of Bitcoin miners online and is important in analyzing a company’s gross profit margins, and number of Bitcoin produced. This data is available on many websites, here is one citation: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/difficulty.

As more people mine Bitcoin (difficulty increases), the daily Bitcoin block reward which presently is fixed at 900 Bitcoin per day, gets split amongst more miners; thus each miner receives a smaller portion of the block reward. Conversely, as Bitcoin prices fall, mining may be less profitable (or not profitable at all) for may miners, causing them to take their hashrate off the network, and consequently causing the Network Difficulty to decrease.

Miners with the lower costs of production, are generally able to continue their production during these volatile cycles. Not all miners will continuously mine during a given period, and as a result, some miners will produce less Bitcoin than expected, relative to their advertised hashrate. For the foregoing reasons, HIVE will self-curtail part of its operations if the unhedged spot energy prices are uneconomical, thereby leaving part of its total gross hashrate unutilized.

We are happy that we have been able to upgrade our global fleet during this crypto market downturn.

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Satoshis and Ordinal Technology

With the advent of Ordinal technology, a protocol that allows individual Satoshis on the Bitcoin blockchain to be assigned a unique identifier, now each Satoshi (the smallest denomination of a Bitcoin possible, being 1/100,000,000 of one Bitcoin) can be identified and tracked. HIVE has mined thousands of Bitcoin as a green energy focused issuer with Bitcoin mining operations.

Every Bitcoin has 100 million Satoshis which now means many new potential opportunities. Frank Holmes says, “I have always believed that green and clean Bitcoins would over time become more valuable as a digital asset because the supply is capped at 21 million Bitcoins. Like Andy Warhol art, when supply is capped, and adoption expands over time the value of his prints have gone up substantially. Now with the explosion in Ordinals we are experiencing new growth with special numbered Satoshis.”

Aydin Kilic, CEO and President of HIVE, commented, “As a technology company, and a pioneer in the Bitcoin mining space, HIVE is a company of firsts. We therefore ardently pursue innovation where we see advances in our sector. Luxor Technology Corporation (“Luxor”) has been a great contributor to the Bitcoin ecosystem, through software and firmware developments, and leading research insights, to name a few things. We were therefore extremely pleased to learn in collaboration with Luxor, that HIVE possesses 250 Uncommon Satoshis in our wallets. There will only ever be approximately 6.93 million Uncommon Satoshis in existence, out of the 2.1 quadrillion total possible Satoshis that will ever exist.”

Nick Hansen, CEO and Founder of Luxor, stated, “At Luxor, we’re excited about the proliferation of Ordinal theory on Bitcoin, which allows information to be inscribed and preserved forever in the Bitcoin blockchain. Working with a technology leader like HIVE to extract and sell their unique Satoshis for a substantial premium has been a pleasure.”

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HIVE has not specified the price which it will be selling its Satoshis, however it will be at a premium.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/169391