The depths of a bear market may not be the best time to raise funds, but that’s exactly what Blockstream is doing..
The crypto infrastructure firm has received fresh funding, but at a much lower valuation than previous roundsaccording to a Bloomberg report on December 7.
Blockstream was valued at $3.2 billion when it held its latest Series B funding round raising $210 million in August 2021.. Today that valuation may have fallen nearly 70% below $1 billion, according to the report.
The company, founded in 2014, has raised a total of $299 million in funding in four rounds, according to CrunchBase.
- Blockstream creates a new type of multisig called ROAST
Blockstream CEO and cryptographer Adam Back did not share details of the latest funding round, but did reveal that the capital will be invested in expanding the firm’s mining capacity.
“We quickly sold all capacity and have a great backlog of existing and new customers with miners seeking large-scale hosting with us.”
The firm is working with Jack Dorsey’s Block (formerly Square) to develop a solar-powered bitcoin mining facility. The mining farm will have 3.8 megawatts (MW) of electrical capacity using Tesla’s solar technology and its 12 MWh lithium-ion “Megapack,” as Cointelegraph reported in April.
Back acknowledged that BTC prices and mining profitability had gone down, but added that “hosting fees have gone up in recent quarters and our mining services are a rapidly expanding, high margin entrepreneurial business for us“.
Currently, bitcoin miners are suffering a triple whammy: high hash rates and difficulty, high energy prices and low BTC prices.. This has caused the profitability, or hash price, to fall to near-record lows of around $0.064 per TH/s per day, according to the Hashrate Index.
In your monthly newsletter for December 5, Blockstream revealed that its Blockstream Mining Note (BMN) token has earned around 5.37 BTC cumulative in returns almost halfway through its three-year term..
BMN is a security token that meets EU requirements and which provides qualified investors access to bitcoin hash rate in enterprise level mining from us company.
The firm has also been promoting a new “Jade Transparent” limited edition hardware wallet. affirming that it is “hodling our bitcoin into the 2090s and beyond.”
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