This week, Argo Blockchain announced its purchase of 320 acres in West Texas. Argo will use the land to build a new bitcoin mining facility over the next 12 months and plans for the facility to be mostly powered by renewables. 

The project is the latest in a stream of bitcoin mining companies extending or transplanting their operations to Texas. 

Here’s a sample of the mining scene in Texas: 

• Although it claims most of its machines are in Asia, Nasdaq-listed mining company Bit Digital has a small but growing presence in Texas through hosted machines maintained by Compute North. 

• Riot Blockchain is piloting an immersion cooling test facility in Texas in anticipation of potentially larger scale deployment of immersion cooled mining in the region. 

• Texas is also home to a Bitcoin mining data centre with a touted energy capacity of 1 GW. The facility has garnered clients like SBI holdings and GMO, two Japanese corporate giants. 

• Bitmain also has a large mining farm in Rockdale, Texas. 

• Layer1, a mining startup previously embroiled in legal disputes, also mines in Texas under its new CEO Jakov Dolic.

• And of course, Texas is home to HODL Ranch, a company that sets up data centers for cryptocurrency miners in West Texas.

Texans have noticed the steadily growing presence of magic internet money minters in their state. Late last year, for example, the Texas Blockchain Council was established to foster growth among bitcoin and other cryptocurrency businesses, including miners, through common sense policy making and public-private partnerships. 

And Texas should love its miners. During recent state-wide power outages, for example, bitcoin miners actually sold unused electricity back to the grid to help mitigate power shortages.

The Compass team has exciting news ! Announced on Friday, Galaxy Digital led a $1.7 million strategic fundraising round with participation by a cadre of other cryptocurrency investors and businesses, including CoinShares, CoinFund, CoinGecko and others. 

Growth in institutional and retail interest in cryptocurrency mining has soared over the past 12 months along with the price of bitcoin. And without mining, there is no bitcoin. 

Industrywide miner revenue in February topped $1.36 billion, setting a new all-time record. Assuming the current bull market isn’t in its final days, miners have more profitable months ahead of them.

Compass is excited to use this investment to scale its team and technology to keep pace with the growth of the mining sector.

Corporate bitcoin investments represent a growing trend over the past 12 months with companies like MicroStrategy, Square, and Tesla all allocating various percentages of their balance sheets to bitcoin. 

Hoarding the coins they mint is also a long-standing practice for many private cryptocurrency mining companies. For example, F2Pool recently told its Twitter followers that they’ve sold zero bitcoins so far in 2021.

But now, publicly traded mining companies are following suit.

Marathon Patent Group holds 4,813 BTC, according to data aggregated by CoinGecko, more than half the amount held by Jack Dorsey’s payments company Square (8,027 BTC). Hut 8 holds 2,851 BTC. And Riot Blockchain holds 1,175 BTC. Other companies like Argo, Galaxy Digital (which recently launched a mining unit), and Hive Blockchain are on the list. 

Put together, these mining companies represent over 0.12% of the total BTC supply, according to CoinGecko data. 

A handful of companies have even bought more bitcoins off the market than they’re mining to push the limits of their accumulation as far as possible. In late January, Marathon bought $150 million in bitcoin. A couple weeks later, Argo Blockchain announced that it also bought thoroughly $6 million (172.5 BTC) in early February. 

With more public companies broadcasting their bitcoin holdings, it’s not surprising to see public bitcoin miners hoard and aggressively accumulate more coins for themselves. Assuming the bitcoin bull market continues, this corporate hoarding trend should continue too.

• Bitcoin bounces back near $55,000. 

  • After chopping around below $50,000 for almost two weeks, bitcoin spiked to just below $55,000 Tuesday morning. Although it’s still a few thousand dollars below its record highs from late February, bitcoin has pushed its year-to-date gains to 84% and its total market value back above $1 trillion. 

• Bitfarms scoops up 48,000 new MicroBT ASICs.

  • Publicly traded mining company Bitfarms announced its purchase of 48,000 MicroBT mining machines earlier this month, which are expected to be delivered incrementally through December 2022. 

• Nvidia defeats lawsuit claiming it lied about revenue from miners. 

  • A more than three-year-old lawsuit against the graphics processor giant was finally dismissed last week after a judge ruled the plaintiffs still didn’t provide sufficient evidence — after multiple opportunities to re-argue their case — that Nvidia misled investors. The lawsuit alleged Nvidia misrepresented $1 Billion in revenue from sales to cryptocurrency miners. 

• Kentucky legislators want to give tax breaks to miners. 

  • State legislators in Kentucky have successfully advanced a proposal for tax breaks for cryptocurrency miners after a budget committee vote gave initial approval. The state’s Senate is also considering a similar proposal to extend sales and electricity tax breaks to miners. 

• Mining difficulty drops 1.27%. 

  • After several consecutive increases, mining difficulty dropped 1.27% last Friday, nearly pushing difficulty back to its previous level from two epochs. Difficulty currently stands at 21.4 trillion. 

• Bitfury is set to go public via an SPAC. 

  • Cipher Mining Technologies is a newly formed mining operation formed as a special purpose acquisition company between Bitfury and Good Works Acquisition. The venture has a value of $2 billion, according to a release.

🧭 Hashrate Under Management (HUM): Compass and Hashr8 want to highllight an important metric that helps to clarify who owns what hash power. H.U.M. works to eliminate commonly double-counted hashrate with both mining facilities and mining service companies claimining it. Read more about this metric in our blog post.

🧭 Kazakhstan Mining: Read the unique advantages and challenges Kazakh bitcoin miners face in the Hashr8 research team’s latest report. A valid email address is required to download the report.

We are a modern media and Bitcoin mining company focused on driving the mass adoption of cryptocurrency. Our research analysts and content creators strive to provide actionable and engaging content on the most relevant industry topics.
 

For more information, to submit a story for review, or to share a newsworthy tip, please email us at media@hashr8.com.

.