Miner outflow has hit a multi-year high as tens of thousands of bitcoin (BTC), worth over $1 billion, have been sent to exchanges.

CryptoQuant data shows that the majority of the bitcoin has moved from mining company F2Pool. Bradley Park, an analyst at the company, told CoinDesk in a Telegram message that the move is due to miners facing increased costs.

Park pointed to the increased costs of F2Pool moving to Kazakhstan and the need to upgrade miners to Bitmain’s latest Antminer T21 before the halving – which decreases the rewards for mining and thus the per-machine yield – as the reason for the outflow.

F2Pool’s hashrate has already begun to increase, suggesting that it has begun upgrading its capacity. Hashrate is the measure of the computational power of a blockchain, group, or individual.

Miners are entities that utilize extensive computing resources to validate transactions and safeguard proof-of-work networks such as bitcoin. Most revenue is typically generated by rewards automatically awarded by the networks they mine in the form of tokens.

Historically, miner outflows to exchanges can be a bearish signal for bitcoin's price, as they often precede price drops, but this isn't always the case, and the correlation is not definitive.

For instance, past increases in miner outflows have sometimes led to price drops, but there have also been occasions, like in August 2019, when bitcoin's price continued to rise despite increased outflows.

Right now, analysts are leading towards the current miner outflow as not being an overly bearish signal as it’s occurring in the shadow of the listing of the first U.S. bitcoin ETFs – a monumental event that's been a decade in the making.