Global Crypto Mining News (Mar 13 to Mar 19)

An independent bitcoin miner who set up a separate pool using the Solo CK Pool mining service received a reward of 6.25 BTC and a fee bonus of approximately 0.63 BTC, with an average hashrate of 6.7 PH/s for the independent miner who claims to be from Russia.

A Twitter user pointed out how lucky the solo miner was to produce the valid hash, saying it would typically take a miner much longer to create a valid transaction given the limited computing power they used.（Decrypt）

Ark Invest, Cathie Wood’s investment management firm, added 186,284 Block shares to three funds on Tuesday. The purchases were estimated at around $13.7 million. Ark added around $6.4 million worth of Block shares on Monday. Block, the company of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, released its Bitcoin “mining development kit” last week.（The Block）

Luxor Technologies has released LuxOS, the first third-party Antminer-compatible firmware fully designed and engineered in the United States. When mining profitability is low, miners can utilize firmware to improve their machine’s power efficiency to increase gross margins.

English education brand Midland Education released its 2022 financial results, with cryptocurrency-related businesses generating a total of $81.599 million in revenue, accounting for 20.4% of total revenue. As of December 31, 2022, the subsidiary owned 1,754 mining machines and mined a total of 84.9638 bitcoins.

LM Funding America, Inc. a crypto mining and technology based specialty finance company, announced today that it has signed a new contract with Aspen Creek Digital Corporation (aka Longbow HostCo, LLC) to host 500 bitcoin miners, all of which are expected to be power up and mine by the end of March 2023. The miners will reportedly use a mix of solar and grid power.（PR Newswire）

Institutional-grade crypto accounting platform Cryptio has partnered with the company behind Filecoin, Protocol Labs, to help Filecoin miners meet audit obligations — an important factor for companies looking to go public.

Cryptio’s software helps crypto companies with accounting, audit and tax software. Filecoin miners, which are the storage providers for the protocol, will be able to generate accounting reports needed to pass their public company accounting oversight board (PCAOB) financial audits, according to a press release. There are currently over 4,000 storage providers (SP) on the Filecoin network, according to the company’s website.（CoinDesk）

BIT Mining Limited announced that the Company entered into a share sale and purchase agreement (the “Sale and Purchase Agreement”) with an unaffiliated third party (the “Buyer”). Under the Agreement, the Purchaser has agreed to purchase all of BIT Mining’s remaining share ownership in Crypto Flow Technology Limited, being 48,195,605 Crypto Flow Shares, representing approximately 8.79% of the total issued share capital of Crypto Flow, at a price of HK$0.38 per share, for a total consideration of HK$18 ,314,330.

The transaction and its terms are subject to the conditions set out in the Sale and Purchase Agreement, including the conditions of the relevant regulatory authorities. Upon completion of the transaction, BIT Mining will no longer own any shares in Crypto Flow. Pursuant to the transaction previously announced on 12 July 2022 and completed on 26 July 2022, BIT Mining has disposed of approximately 51% of the total issued share capital of Crypto Flow, reducing its shareholding in Crypto Flow to 8.79%.（PRNewswire）

Bitcoin miner Marathon Digital’s fourth quarter and full year 2022 financial results show a net loss of $686.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2022, compared to a net loss of $37.1 million for the year 2021.

Marathon Digital recorded a fourth quarter impairment charge of $332.9 million in 2022 compared to 2021 related to the carrying value of mining equipment and vendor prepayments; the carrying value of digital assets, including impairments and realized and unrealized losses, decreased by $317.6 million.

The Filecoin community has announced that the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) was successfully launched on March 14 at 3:14 PM UTC. Smart contracts and user programmability are now supported on the Filecoin blockchain through the FVM. With the FVM, developers can deploy smart contracts and plan ways to store, govern and liquidate data in the public market.

The release of FVM is the final piece of Filecoin’s main plan. “FVM is a major step forward for blockchain and Web3, enabling developers to create new types of applications and empowering the enormous potential of smart contracts to large-scale data”, said Juan Benet, founder of Protocol Lab.