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How Ethiopia’s Low Energy Costs Allow BIT Mining to Recycle its Bitcoin Machines

Published

2 месяца ago

7 января, 2025

Landlocked between six different neighbors in the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia has approximately 120 million inhabitants, making it the second most populous nation on the continent, and a GDP of $163 billion, which puts it in the same economic league as Ukraine, Morocco, Slovakia or Kuwait.

However, the country has also suffered from a bloody civil war, with several regions still under the control of anti-government forces, like the ethno-nationalist Amhara militia Fano.

But that hasn’t prevented Chinese bitcoin (BTC) mining company BIT Mining (BTCM) from expanding its operations — until now confined to Akron, Ohio — into Ethiopia by signing a $14 million deal to acquire facilities worth 51 megawatts (MW) and almost 18,000 bitcoin mining rigs in the country.

In fact, for Dr. Youwei Yang, chief economist at BIT Mining, Ethiopia’s ultra-low electricity costs provide the firm with a unique opportunity to extend the shelf life of its bitcoin mining rigs which, due to the industry’s extreme competitiveness, tend to become obsolete in the U.S. after roughly two or two-and-a-half years of activity, he said.

“The price of electricity is maybe 70% higher in Ohio than in Ethiopia, sometimes almost double, so it can only run very advanced ASICs, like the newest or second newest generations,” Yang told CoinDesk in an interview. “Now we can just move older generation machines into Ethiopia.”

It’s a big deal, because aside from mining litecoin (LTC) and dogecoin (DOGE), BIT Mining is mainly in the hosting business, meaning that it operates mining facilities for the sake of various clients. State-of-the-art mining rigs don’t come cheap (a single machine fetching anywhere between $5,000 and $10,000 for retail buyers) and investors are naturally reluctant to send such expensive pieces of machinery to war-torn jurisdictions.

The pitch, then, is to install the newer rigs in the U.S. and send out the aging ones to Ethiopia. That creates a positive feedback loop, because now investors can extract greater returns from their machines than if BIT Mining restricted itself to operating in the U.S. That, in turn, attracts more capital, Yang said.

“We can get at least two extra years by moving the rigs to Ethiopia, and then maybe after that, they’re completely done,” Yang said.

Mining bitcoin in Ethiopia

But why Ethiopia specifically? For one thing, the country’s electric standard is similar to China’s, which allows BIT Mining to leverage the expertise of its engineering team and redeploy some of the electric equipment it previously used in the Middle Kingdom before the bitcoin mining ban.

Ethiopia also enjoys an abundance of hydroelectric power, some of it thanks to Chinese investments, which have totalled $8.5 billion across more than 3,000 projects in recent years. For example, China helped fund the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD); once completed, it will be the largest dam in Africa and generate over 5,000 MW.

Not all of Ethiopia’s electric output has been put to use yet, however, and that has created a window of opportunity for bitcoin miners, especially since the Ethiopian government has been supportive of the mining industry. In fact, the country is home to 1.5% of Bitcoin’s total hashrate, according to Hashrate Index, meaning that it contributes about as much to the network as Norway.

That’s despite the fact that the Ethiopian federal government has a shaky control over the country’s overall territory. Hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians were killed in the government’s war against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front between 2020 and 2022, and the state only just signed a peace treaty in December with the Oromo Liberation Army, which it had been fighting in some form or other since the 1970s.

When asked whether BIT Mining had concerns about the social unrest in the country, Yang replied that the firm had been “studying, researching and also visiting [Ethiopia] several times, just [ascertain] that it’s a stable place.” The decision was made to purchase a facility instead of building it from scratch to avoid any unforeseen trouble, he said.

Even so, it was a challenge convincing BIT Mining employees to move to Ethiopia from their previous domiciles in the U.S. or China, Yang said.

“People obviously like to live and work in richer and safer countries,” he said. While a third of the facility’s operating team are foreign right now, the team will be composed of mostly locals down the line, he said.

In the meantime, the company is on the lookout for new investments in the country — be them energy infrastructure projects, data centers for artificial intelligence (AI) purposes, or other bitcoin mining facilities.

“There’s plenty of opportunities in Ethiopia,” Yang said. “The AI thing… We’ve been studying it for the last six to nine months. We have the power. We have the people. We have the ability to do it. But [the whole process] is very capital heavy. Construction in the U.S. is a lot more expensive, so it’s very hard to do a pilot experiment, but it’s a lot easier to [try one] in Ethiopia.”

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Payments Card Issuer Infini Offers Reward for Return of Funds After $49 Million Exploit

Published

4 часа ago

24 февраля, 2025

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Infini, a prepaid payments card issuer that offers interest on deposited dollar stablecoins, warned a hacker it had “gathered critical IP and device information” after losing almost all the value locked in its wallets.

The attacker drained $49.5 million from the Hong Kong-based neobank’s wallets, according to Peckshield. The company said only on Sunday it had hit $50 million in total value locked.

The exploit came just days after Bybit, the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, saw a hacker drain its ether cold wallet and make off with nearly $1.5 billion in crypto’s largest exploit.

“We are closely monitoring the address involved and are prepared to take immediate action to freeze any stolen funds if necessary,» Infini told the hacker in a blockchain transaction. «In an effort to resolve this matter amicably, we are willing to offer you 20% of the stolen assets should you choose to return the funds.”

Infini gave the perpetrator 48 hours to “facilitate a swift resolution,” and that failure to respond means it will “have no choice” but to continue its investigation in collaboration with law enforcement.

According to Cyvers, the exploit occurred after a developer who helped set up its smart contract kept admin rights over it. More than three months later, they leveraged these rights and drained the funds to a wallet funded over cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash.

The neobank’s founder, Christian Li, has pledged to cover the full loss from his personal funds and took responsibility for the incident.

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Chintai Tokenizes $570M Real Estate Cash-Flow for RealNOI

Published

4 часа ago

24 февраля, 2025

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RealNOI, a company focused on transforming real estate income into a tradable asset, has rolled out its blockchain-powered rental income platform build on top of real-world asset (RWA) tokenization service Chintai.

The platform gives investors access to cash flows worth $570 million from nearly 1,900 apartments with projected annual returns exceeding 5%. Unlike traditional real estate tokenization, which involves fractional property ownership, RealNOI focuses solely on rental income, eliminating the need for title transfers, notaries, or direct property management. Rental cash flows are recorded on-chain for real-time transparency and can be traded on secondary markets.

RealNOI’s launch represents a significant jump from the $124 million initially projected when the company announced its partnership with Chintai in December.

«We have been flooded with inquiries [since the announcement],» Connor Gallic, chief blockchain officer at RealNOI, said in an interview with CoinDesk. Citing a report from commercial real estate intelligence service CRED iQ, he said that 40% of multi-family property owners’ loans have trouble getting refinancing because higher interest rates diminished property valuations and needed additional capital. Tokenizing the rental cashflows can help bridge the capital needs.

«There is a big dislocation in the market,» Gallic said. «Our solution fixes that. And it gives the crypto community an opportunity to show the finance markets the power of the crypto markets to transform the finance industry in a meaningful way.

Chintai describes its services as «Shopify» for asset tokenization with its layer-1 blockchain and native token CHEX powering the network. Chintai Network Services Pte Ltd, the network’s ecosystem development firm, is regulated and licensed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to act as a Capital Markets Services provider and a Recognized Market Operator for primary issuance and secondary market trading in digital securities, according to the project’s white paper.

In this case, RealNOI sources and curates the properties for the platform, while the Chintai handles all tokenization processes, including creating RentStream tokens representing rental income that investors can buy, automated rent payouts through smart contracts and compliance with regulations.

«RealNOI going live is super exciting, but the wider story as well is that this model can be replicated across various industries,» a spokesperson for Chintai said. «You could have countless versions of RealNOI launching with Chintai, powering everything.»

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DekaBank Rolls Out Crypto Trading, Custody Services for Institutions: Bloomberg

Published

6 часов ago

24 февраля, 2025

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DekaBank, a German investment bank with 377 billion euros ($395 billion) in assets under management, introduced cryptocurrency trading and custody services for institutional clients after almost two years of development.

The Frankfurt-based company’s move follows regulatory approval for a crypto custody license from the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin), while operating under the supervision of the European Central Bank (ECB), Bloomberg reported.

«We have the necessary experience, required licenses and a tested, ready-to-use infrastructure to support savings banks and our institutional clients,» board member Martin K. Müller told Bloomberg.

DekaBank, the asset manager of the country’s largest financial services group, Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe, is marketing its new offering with a focus on security and regulatory compliance, according to the report.

Other cryptocurrency offerings in the country’s broader savings bank sector have already been introduced. Financial institutions such as Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW), have partnered with crypto platforms like Bitpanda to allow corporate clients to buy and sell cryptocurrencies.

Meanwhile Germany’s cooperative banks, led by DZ Bank, are planning to roll out a cryptocurrency offering aimed at private customers by the middle of the year. The initiative is being launched alongside IT service provider Atruvia and the Stuttgart Stock Exchange.

DekaBank had not responded to a request for a comment by publication time.