It’s been a weird week in the cryptocurrency sector. Shiba Inu seems to be everywhere, ditto with NFTs, and miners are quietly gobbling up enough power to fuel multiple small countries in pursuit of that ever-elusive bitcoin payday. Here’s how it all went down.
Hut 8 Mining goes to work on a new station in North Bay
Hut 8 Mining (HUT.T) has expanded their portfolio out to include setting up a third mining option, this one taking advantage of a 35 megawatt electricity generating station in conjunction with a prior deal with Validus Power, and located in North Bay, Ontario.
The company is expecting the new station to go live by the end of 2021. The North Bay site will give Hut 8 the ability to generate power using a blend of byproduct steam, hydrogen and natural gas, along with a secondary geothermal option.
“We couldn’t be more excited to diversify our power blend across the country and to continue to take advantage of Canada’s favourable climate. This third location demonstrates our commitment to sustainable technological innovation as we continue to expand our operations and strive to remain an industry-leading bitcoin miner,” said Jaime Leverton, chief executive officer of Hut 8.
This decision comes after the company reported they were going to be developing a third site in Alberta, Canada. But supply chain issues and disrupted related to the COVID-19 pandemic made the timeline complicated, and Hut 8 decided it would be best to shift their focus to develop the site at the Validus-owned location in North Bay.
This is how Tokenization is changing the game
Tokenization is one of the hidden gems of this whole NFT craze. Why? The idea of tokenization is that it unlocks the idea of splitting up ownership among a number of different people, which means that instead of one person owning the vintage Mickey Mantle, it could be spread out to multiple different directions. It’s one of the key promises that non fungible tokens opens up beyond just a visual image of some weird cat on a pink background.
That’s partially why ThreeD Capital (IDK.C) invested USD$400K and acquired 1.6 million shares of Liquid Marketplace this week. The addition of this investment boost the company’s total shares in Liquid to 3.1 million. Liquid Marketplace is a private company involved in the tokenization of of collectible trading cards. Liquid has created a secondary marketplace where users can swap ownership with each other with instant settlements on trades.
No lawyers. No mediation. Only smart contracts. The great promise of NFTs (and honestly a lot of things in blockchain-tech) is that it eliminates the need for middle-men.
Wuhan Group and the first blockchain related supply-side solution for psilocybin
Wuhan General Group (WUHN.OTC) is normally heard about only in terms of the nascent psilocbyin market, but in this case they’ve actually potentially found a solution to a problem nobody had even thought about yet regarding supply. In this case, they’ve partnered wtih M2Bio Blockchain Research and Technology Group to finish Phase 1 of their blockchain supply chain solution, and they have phase two underway already.
“Our in-depth research has exposed multiple vulnerabilities and inefficiencies in present centralized supply chain offerings, and we are confident that the model we have designed will be a significant competitor to the likes of Oracle, SAP, and Amazon,” say Dr. Southey and Dr. Zarrebini, directors of the M2Bio Blockchain Research and Technology Group.
At its most basic level, the solution provides seamless onboarding to a private blockchain, which can provide trust in manufacturing and product provenance. It takes advantage of the inherent trustless architecture of a private permissioned blockchain (limited accessibility—think intranet versus internet) and smart contracts for privacy, authenticity and transparency.
The company also intends on incorporating other perks like micropayments, tokenizaation and other technologies including internet-of-things and artificial intelligence.
The information is a little scarce on the ground as to how they’re going to implement this supply-side blockchain, but given the technology’s immutability function and greater transparency, it shouldn’t be that speculate. Each data block represents a point in the supply chain, which receives information about suppliers, growth, yield, dates, etc, which are then there for everyone to see.
It’s ultimately not that much different from what private companies like Beefchain and TruTrace Technologies (TTT.C) offer, but for psilocybin instead of steak or cannabis.
Mogo begins offering green bitcoin
Mogo (MOGO.T) has upped their game when it comes to the green crypto bandwagon. They’ve always offered a carbon-offset option to their product options wherein for every $1 you spend, they offset 1 pound of carbon.
But in this case, they’ve launched green bitcoin, which makes all bitcoin purchased on the Mogo platform climate positive by planting enough trees to offset the CO2 emissions produced by mining that bitcoin.
The initiative also includes all bitcoin presently held by members on the platform, which gives me the idea that they’ve hired a cadre of grad students to head out on their weekend to plant tree after tree after tree. But oh well. What good are grad students for?
Regardless, the global market for crypto is over USD$2.7 trillion and bitcoin has approximately 50% of that. So far in October, bitcoin’s average 24-hour trading volume is $37 billion. The efforts of poor beleaguered grad students aside, bitcoin represents a significant opportunity for investors who value environmental, social and governance principles, even if at least for right now, the environmental factors are considered a net negative. It does, after all, use as much power as the entire country of Sweden in a year and most of that isn’t from sustainable sources.
“Bitcoin is the best-performing asset class of the past decade with massive inflows of capital daily. But the tremendous potential of bitcoin is hindered by its environmental impact; the emissions created by mining are among the greatest problems facing this asset class today. By launching green bitcoin, we’ve made buying bitcoin good for the planet and arguably one of the most ESG-oriented investments anyone can make,” said David Feller, chief executive officer of Mogo.
If you’re interested in some stats—18.8 bitcoin have been mined to date, and for each one, the estimate is roughly 421,000 pounds of CO2 emissions have been released into the atmosphere. Mogo intends to address this problem by planting trees to offset 500,000 pounds of CO2 for each bitcoin on its platform. These numbers are a bit funky because they consider that all of the bitcoin mined have been mined using fossil fuels, when they haven’t. Plenty of companies use hydro or geothermal or in the case of former Equity Guru marketing client, EarthRenew (ERTH.C), organic fertilizer.
But the point is a strong one. Many companies aren’t doing the work to help the rest of us out of this environmental jam when they should be. Mogo isn’t one of them.
Globalblock rides the crypto-train to onboarding success in 2021
Given the success of NFT’s, other tokenized assets, memecoins like Shiba Inu, and the general uptick in positive news coverage for cryptocurrency in 2021, it’s no wonder that companies like Globalblock Digital Asset Trading’s (BLOK.V) GlobalBlock subsidiary has enjoyed an onboarding success rate of over 146% in the first three quarters over those of last year. This one, though, falls into both the business to consumer and business to business categories and includes both the retail and institutional crowd.
Marketing is easy when market sentiment is going your way. Honestly, when everyone’s writing nice things about the asset underlying your product, then it has to be the easiest job in the world. Regardless, they’re starting up a campaign to take try and saddle some of that momentum for themselves—using the company’s multichannel offering to get the word out.
“It is exciting to see the business grow organically with the increasing adoption of digital assets and uniquely by word of mouth. As we scale up further, we expect this to continue with the start of our marketing campaign and make future enhancements to GlobalBlock U.K.’s service offering. The implementation of CRM tools, such as Salesforce, is another step up for the business and its maturation,” said Rufus Round, CEO.
Sure. Why not? Maybe I’m being cynical here, but most of what constitutes success is being in the right place at the right time.
Bitfarms puts up the time and cash for two new farms in City of Sherbrooke
If you want to be successful in mining Bitcoin, you gotta scale while cutting costs. Most companies do that in chunks. They’ll get on a colocation service for subsidized electricity, and then start blowing out cash on Antminers or black boxes, getting in bed with Canaan Creative (CAN.Q) for chips and ASICs or Bitmain for wall to wall servers.
And some, like Bitfarms (BITF.Q), go all the way—building their own bunker with machines, electricity and ultimately Bitcoin.
The Bunker: 48 MW Facility expected to deliver 1,300 PH/s
- Construction, expected to be completed in mid-2022, will be in three phases:
- Phase one, representing 18 MW to be installed in an already constructed building, is scheduled to begin internal infrastructure work in the fourth quarter of 2021.
- Phase two, representing 18 MW, is in a portion of the building still under construction, with internal infrastructure work to begin in the first quarter of 2022.
- Phase three, representing 12 MW, is in a portion of the building scheduled to be constructed in the second quarter of 2022.
- 13,000 miners are expected to be housed in The Bunker and generate about 1.3 EH/s.
- The first two phases are expected to hold over 9,750 miners and yield nearly 975 PH/s.
- The third phase is expected to hold another 3,250 miners and produce approximately 325 PH/s.
Why not cut out the middleman?
Hive Blockchain makes a $450,000 investment into NFT business
Hive Blockchain Technologies (HIVE.V) latest investment is in a company called Network Entertainment (NTE.V). They’re an award-winning production company and they represent a significant side-door into the non-fungible token space.
It’s odd to think of NFT’s as a “space” but given that this sub-sector of cryptocurrency/blockchain actually has an earnings expectation comparable to some of the more established sectors, then it’s easy to say it is what it is. If you’re looking for an approximate dollar amount, it’s $1.05 trillion in 2020 in four core categories: art, collectibles, luxury goods, games and gambling.
“We’re backing a strong team at Network Entertainment. I’ve known board member Tim Gamble for years, who’s a true visionary, having co-founded and been a former [chief executive officer] of Thunderbird Entertainment Group Inc. (TBRD.V). Network has a rich portfolio of intellectual property, and I’m excited to see how it can be monetized using NFTs. Most NFTs operate on the ethereum network, as does its native currency ether, which Hive mines, along with bitcoin, using only 100-per-cent-green renewable energy. As NFTs increase in demand, so too should the demand for ether. Hive is well positioned to benefit from the increased need for ether, making its investment in Network a potential win-win for both companies,” said Frank Holmes, CEO for Hive.
Why not get yourself a piece of that hot NFT action while the market is good and frothy? Makes sense to me. But don’t take my word for it – Equity Guru head honcho Chris Parry went to town on these guys this week. Take it from him.
Have you ever wanted to be a NFT and have a cameo on a TV show?
Now you can do both.
Bonanza Goldfields (BONZ.OTC) subsidiary Marvion, is auctioning off a Hybrid NFT (h-NFT) cameo in the upcoming drama series Forensic Psychologist on the OKEx NFT marketplace on Oct 29. The hitch is that if you’re reading this from North America, you’ll have to hop a plane to China.
Forensic Psychologist is a 12-episode series produced in Hong Kong for the local and international audience. Each 30 minute episode tells the story of forensic psychologist Dr Many Cheung, whose job it is to assess the mental capacity of criminals to determine if they’re mentally fit to stand trial.
The winner of the auction will show up on the show and have a NFT made from your likeness.
“We were very encouraged by the positive results following the sell-out of our first launch of h-NFTs on OKEx. In line with the company’s vision, this h-NFT will offer an amazing experience and memory for one lucky fan, captured on the blockchain. By offering the opportunity for fans and film enthusiasts to cameo in a quality production like “Forensic Psychologist”, we believe this will revolutionise the traditional film and drama industry and allow the community to not just watch the series, but to also be a part of it, literally,” said Julian So, interim CEO of Marvion.
I doubt airfare to China is included, though.
Future Fintech goes to Paraguay for their Bitcoin mining
Normally it works the other way. Cryptominer having a hard time competing with the big guns in the field seeks to stretch their OPEX out to include another vertical. The hint for what Future Fintech (FTFT.Q) does is in the name. They’re a fintech company specializing in e-commerce with a blockchain-based marketplace called Chain Cloud Mall.
And now they’re looking to expand out into mining. The narrative deviates away from the standard with this one in that they were actually invited to come mine in Paraguay by the country’s Minister of Social Development and the Mayor of the City of Coronel Oviedo. That’s a bit different than the opposite, wherein the miners aren’t pulling in enough Bitcoin to cover their overhead, so they pivot into fintech.
With the appropriate deal in place, this could be an excellent pivot for Future Fintech, and it definitely makes them one to watch.
—Joseph Morton