Bitcoin Miner Hive Digital Reveals $60 Million Paraguay Expansion Push

Canadian Bitcoin mining big Hive Digital is betting huge on Paraguay.

The public agency—which trades on each the Toronto inventory exchange and Nasdaq—introduced Tuesday it purchased 13,480 items of recent mining machines to increase its operations within the South American nation.

Priced at over $60 million, the deal will assist it safe 2% of the worldwide Bitcoin community. The machines—Bitmain Antminer S21+ Hydros—ship a hashrate capability of 4.3 exahashes per second (EH/s). An exahash is a measure of a Bitcoin mining machine’s processing energy.

The agency additionally secured an choice to buy an extra 4.3 EH/s value of the identical mannequin, exercisable inside one 12 months. If the choice is absolutely exercised, then Hive’s mining fleet may increase to eight.6 EH/s—and it hopes to hit a mining hashrate of 15 EH/s by the summer season of 2025.

Executive Chairman Frank Holmes mentioned that when absolutely deployed, the growth to fifteen EH/s would “propel Hive to over $300 million in annualized revenue and deliver more than $200 million in mining margin, based on current mining economics.”

So why Paraguay? Hive has been eyeing up the chance for years. In 2022, the miner met with the President Santiago Peña for a 100-megawatt operation utilizing inexperienced vitality from the Itaipu hydroelectric dam. The website remains to be below growth.

Holmes informed Decrypt that apart from having an abundance of inexperienced vitality, Paraguay’s authorities was “pro-business” and low-tax.

He additionally mentioned that the deal benefited the federal government: Instead of promoting their low-cost electrical energy to neighboring Argentina, they might flog it to Hive for its mining operation and obtain {dollars}—and it really works as an inflation hedge.

“They sell electricity to Argentina for one penny, and there’s slow pay or no pay,” he mentioned. “And here, with us, they get the money every month. They get U.S. dollars. So as the other currencies have been declining, it’s an embedded hedge, and their banks can’t hedge their currency against the U.S. dollar.”

“Here we’re helping Latin countries earn foreign currency in a stable manner,” he added.

In the world of Bitcoin, miners are essential to hold the community operating and to mint new digital cash. Such operations now sometimes consist of big warehouses full of costly custom-built machines, making mining a expensive and aggressive endeavor.

Bitcoin miners are more and more interested in Paraguay for its low-cost, inexperienced electrical energy—and lawmakers wish to make it a crypto hub.

President Peña beforehand mentioned he needs the nation—which neighbors Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia—to be a tech hub and a “center of integration” between Latin America and the remainder of the world.

Edited by Andrew Hayward