BT Daily News: Skype Co-Founder Leads $13M Investment in Liquid-Cooled Bitcoin Mining Tech

by CHarvey October 14, 2022

1. Skype Co-Founder Leads $13M Investment in Liquid-Cooled Bitcoin Mining Tech

Cryptography hardware technology company Fabric Systems raised $13 million in a seed round from investors to build energy-efficient Bitcoin mining hardware.

Silicon Valley-based Fabric Systems will use the money to build an “immersion-native” Bitcoin miner and a general-purpose accelerator for cryptographic algorithms.

The cryptographic accelerator is intended to make calculations faster and more efficient on the blockchain, allowing for advanced cryptographic algorithms such as zero knowledge proofs—a cryptography method to prove that something is known without revealing the known information directly. The tech was first used by the privacy coin Zcash but Fabric Systems said the plan is for the accelerator to be used by other industries outside of crypto—such as real estate.

“Immersion-native” machines refers to Bitcoin miners which are dunked in a thermally conductive liquid to cool them down and make them more energy efficient, because the process allows for more BTC to be mined with fewer machines.

2. Binance Pool Starts $500 Million Fund to Support Bitcoin Mining

Binance Pool has started a $500 million lending project for private and public miners. The miners will need to pledge security in the form of physical or digital assets for the loan, which will have a duration of 18-24 months.

Binance Pool recently opened up a mining pool for ETHW, the forked version of Ethereum that retains the blockchain's original proof-of-work (PoW) underpinnings.

Binance isn't the only firm that is looking to support the struggling crypto mining industry, Jihan Wu, the founder of crypto mining rig-maker Bitmain, is also setting up a $250 million fund to purchase distressed assets from mining firms.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platform Maple Finance has also established a lending pool with a 20% interest rate to provide miners with working capital. Crypto asset management firm Grayscale has also formed an investment vehicle to help investors take advantage of the low prices of bitcoin mining infrastructures.

3. Bitcoin Miner Pow.re Begins Mining Facility Construction in Paraguay, Acquires 3,600 Microbt ASICs

According to the crypto mining operation Pow.re Holdings Limited, the firm announced that it has begun construction of two new mining facilities in Asunción, Paraguay. The new data centers will manage 12 megawatts (MW) of hydroelectric power, and the firm has also acquired 3,600 Microbt Whatsminer mining rigs that produce roughly 396 petahash per second (PH/s) of hashrate.

The first site is expected to be fully operational by the end of 2022’s fourth quarter and the second should be readied by Q1 2023. The company says that the expansion will add a lot more hashpower to the firm’s operations and it hopes to achieve 0.5 exahash per second (EH/s) by Q2 2023.

Just recently, Pow.re was in the news after it was revealed that Quebec’s Mohawk Council of Kahnawake was seeking power for crypto mining opportunities. The report noted that Pow.re was working with members of the Kahnawake council. As far as the latest expansion in Paraguay is concerned, Pow.re’s co-founder and COO SJ Oh explained that the project stems from “two years of due diligence” coming to fruition.

“Proof-of-work protocols have the capacity to serve as synthetic batteries for stranded renewable energy sources, and we look forward to contributing to the proliferation of renewable energy generation,” Pow.re’s co-founder added during the announcement.

4. Crypto Mining Firm BitNile to Start Bitcoin-Based Marketplace Next Year

Bitcoin mining firm BitNile (NILE) plans to set up a bitcoin-based marketplace in the first half of next year aiming to reduce the complexity of conducting transactions in bitcoin.

BitNile intends for the marketplace to be a multi-vendor e-commerce platform, available on a mobile phone or web application that can provide multiple services including payment processing, according to an announcement on Thursday.

The Last Vegas-based firm is seeking to make using bitcoin for transactions more attractive both by making it convenient and by offering lower transaction fees than those in traditional e-commerce.

BitNile may also be looking to diversify its business away from bitcoin mining, given the squeeze on margins the industry has experienced in recent months with bitcoin's depressed price and high energy costs.

The grim outlook was compounded further earlier this week when the Bitcoin network's mining difficulty surged to an all-time high, meaning it has never been harder for miners to extract new bitcoin.

5. Crypto Trading Firm Amber CEO Says Bitcoin Can Still Be an Inflation Hedge

Crypto faithful have recently started questioning bitcoin’s hedging role as more speculative than real. But some traders, including Michael Wu, the co-founder of crypto trading firm Amber, have counter-argued that market dynamics explain recent falling prices instead of buyer sentiment.

“It is a bit early to say crypto failed as an “investment hedge,” Wu, recently told. “Short-term correlations say more about overall liquidity conditions, as we are on a rate-hiking cycle and supply-demand dynamics as most crypto investors are also tech investors and had to reduce their portfolio across the board, rather than fundamental drivers.”

Wu added: “Bitcoin is still a better form of storage of value than anything else that existed before, and Ethereum along with the decentralized digital economy being built upon it offers tremendous value as a tech infrastructure investment,” Wu said, stressing the “need to be more patient” to see the value propositions of alternative currencies play out over the next few years or even decades.

Wu and similar types of investors are taking a long-term approach toward cryptocurrency investments that actively avoid chasing short-term movements, and instead, embrace a structural shift from traditional finance to the crypto ecosystem.

“If we zoom out beyond the short-term trading horizon which crypto folks are too used to focusing on and look at the long-term structural trends, we will see that the fundamental investment values in crypto as an asset class have continuously become stronger and stronger over time,” Wu said.