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Miner riot blockchain changed its name to riot platforms in order to reflect a more diversified activity.
In a press release, the company announced that, despite the renaming, it would continue to trade using the symbol of the nasdaq riot.
Riot Self-Mining Hashrate Could Hit 12.5 EH/s by Q1 2023
rebranding announcement comes roughly a year-and-a-half after the company closed a deal to acquire a Rockdale, Texas Bitcoin hosting facility belonging to Whinstone US. Riot also agreed to acquire electrical equipment manufacturer ESS Metron seven months later.
“Our activities continue to grow in scope and scope, and this new image better reflects our position as strategic capital splitters to further expand the reach of our Bitcoin transactions," said CEO Jason Les.
Whinstone and Riot will operate under the commercial entity Riot Platforms, while ESS Metron will continue to operate under its current name as a result of customer familiarity with the brand.
Riot’s Q3 2022 financial and operational updates revealed lower Bitcoin production in the quarter, owing to the company’s power-curtailment strategy and a lower BTC price. Bitcoin fell by 60 per cent in 2022 and is currently down 75 per cent compared to November. A historic peak of approximately $69,000 in 2021.
Riot hopes to achieve a self-mining hashrate capacity of 12.5 Exahashes/second should it successfully deploy 115,450 Antminer ASICs by Q1 2023 and receive no production boost from its 200MW immersion-cooling infrastructure.
Miners Return Equipment to Extinguish Debt
Several miners are filing for bankruptcy or returning ASICs because they can’t service debt accrued during previous Bitcoin bull markets. Asics are specially designed mining computers that miners use to solve a crypto puzzle needed to spread a trading block to the Bitcoin network and win Bitcoin.
In the early days of crypto mining, borrowers often dictated the terms and conditions of loan agreements. As a result, most mining companies offered asylums as security, making these machines the main way for lenders to recover their investment in the event of insolvency of miners.
With bitcoin buffeted across several fronts, including the threat of recession in the United States and a general malaise in the cryptography industry following the collapse of a number of key crypto entities, some miners coping with a decline in their BTC income have returned asics to their lenders. In some cases, the return of machinery is cheaper than the repayment of loans.
Sydney-based Iris Energy and Stronghold Digital Mining chose to return machines to erase their debt, while Greenidge Generation Holdings signed a non-binding term sheet to sell their devices to lender NYDIG. Nydig will reduce greenidge debt by taking ownership of the machines greenidge will host from now on.
Argo Blockchain recently sold all of its Texas operations to mining finance company Galaxy Digital for $65 million to help avert bankruptcy.
Texas miner Core Scientific could recoup $2 million monthly from the shutdown of about 37,000 ASICs belonging to bankrupt lender Celsius Network. Core Scientific filed for bankruptcy in Dec. 2022.
The Texas-based miner had previously asked a court to uphold an earlier hosting agreement between itself and Celsius which compelled the defunct lender to cover rising energy costs. The lender, who is himself the subject of bankruptcy proceedings under Chapter 11, failed to make the necessary payments, causing Core to close the ATMs.
