Bankrupt crypto lender BlockFi plans to sell loans backed by 68,000 bitcoin miners for about $160 million. Sources familiar with the matter said that given the current price of bitcoin miners, some of the loans are already in default and are under-collateralized.
2.
Lawmakers in the European Parliament have proposed taxes on crypto assets to fund the European Union’s annual budget of 170 billion euros ($185 billion). Options included in a draft report for the Parliament’s budget committee, published on Jan. 16, include taxes on investors’ capital gains, transactions or mining.
The report “suggests the introduction of a European tax on crypto assets, whose revenues would flow into the European budget,” the report by French lawmaker Valérie Hayer and Portuguese Social Democrat José Manuel Fernandes stated. “Regulating and taxing crypto assets at the EU level is more efficient than at national level given their high mobility and cross-border dimension.”（CoinDesk）
3.
Bitcoin miner and hosting provider Blockstream raised $125 million in a convertible note and secured loan financing round. The company will use the money to expand its institutional bitcoin mining colocation services. Blockstream had already raised $210 million in a series B round in 2021. Its business also extends to hardware and Layer-2 technologies like Core Lightning.（The Block）
4.
BlackRock Inc. and Apollo Global Management Inc. are among a group of creditors that lent around $500 million to bankrupt Bitcoin miner Core Scientific Inc. by purchasing its secured convertible notes. In addition to the convertible notes, it has borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars from crypto lending platforms through loans backed by its mining equipment.
5.
Cumulus Data has completed a data center connected to Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna nuclear power station, with plans to this year begin hosting the space for Bitcoin mining company TeraWulf. The center’s completion, which was announced last week by Cumulus Data, sets it up to be the first nuclear-powered bitcoin mine in the US.
6.
Core Scientific has filed an emergency motion this week looking to fire-sell Bitmain coupons with a face value of $6.6 million. The majority of the coupons expire on March 22. They can only be applied to new purchases of the AntMiner S19s model with a lower output. They can only be used to pay for 30% of new purchases from Bitmain.（BlocksBridge）
7.
Bitcoin’s network-wide hashrate difficulty increased by 4.68% on January 29, with the network-wide hashrate continuing to increase to 295 EH/s. Bitcoin prices have risen by 40% so far in January, and Ant Mining T17+, Sleipnir M20, and others have returned to above the shutdown price.
8.
Argo Blockchain announced that with the recovery of its share price, the company has regained compliance with Nasdaq stock listing rule 5450(a)(1), which is to maintain a minimum closing price of $1 for ten consecutive trading days, on January 13 of this year, meaning that the company will not be mandatorily delisted.
9.
Fixed-rate contracts from hosting providers could be a thing of the past as the bitcoin mining hosting landscape transforms in 2023, Galaxy Digital said in a recent report. Hosting providers proved to be the hardest hit in the space.
“The bitcoin mining industry is currently going through a purge of all of the excess and misallocations of capital that supported weak business models during the bull market of 2021,” the bank said. “Miners ended 2022 in survival mode, setting the stage for more turbulent times ahead in 2023.”
In 2022, miners defaulted on $277 million of ASIC-backed loans, handing back over 11.59 EH of machines to lenders, Galaxy estimated.（The Block）
10.
Bitcoin miners’ reserves currently stand at 1,837,138 BTC, the lowest level since December 2021. CoinLupin believes that miners are still selling their BTC reserves, possibly to shore up capital in the event of a market reversal. Bitcoin’s hashrate hit an all-time high on Jan. 26, averaging over 275 EH/s.（Cointelegraph）
11.
Law firm Pomerantz has filed a class action lawsuit in the District Court for the Eastern District of New York against bitcoin miner Argo Blockchain and certain of its executives, bringing claims against defendant Argo on behalf of participating users of Argo’s initial public offering and users of Argo’s securities traded between September 23, 2021 and October 10, 2022.
Pomerantz alleges that its offering documents were negligently prepared and therefore contained untrue statements of material fact or omitted to state other facts necessary to make the statements made not misleading, and were not prepared in accordance with the rules and regulations governing their preparation, and that throughout the class period, the defendants made materially false and misleading statements about the company’s business, operations and prospects.（Globenewswire）
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