Another Distressed Bitcoin Mine Set for Auction
Bankrupt Texas miner gets court order to sell assets at Temple location
It's been close to six months since the halving and there have been quite many mergers and acquisitions resulting from miner capitulation. Check out our previous issue about the $850 million deals changing hands for over 1.2 GW of capacities.
Now a new bid is emerging after Rhodium Enterprises filed Chapter 11 for two of its subsidiaries, which came less than a month after bitcoin’s hashprice–a measure of bitcoin mining profitability–set a record low of $36/PH/s.
The court overseeing the Rhodium Chapter 11 case has established an order granting Rhodium’s motion to sell all or parts of its assets at the Temple location in Texas through an auction.
According to the court's order, Rhodium will solicit and select the highest or best offer for all or part of its Temple assets through one or more sales. A proposed timeline for the auction has been outlined, and more details about the Temple assets can be found in TheMinerMag's article on this topic.
Rhodium will need to consult with its Debtor-in-possession (DIP) creditor (i.e. Galaxy Digital) before making any changes to the auction plan or schedule unless the DIP creditor is a participating party in the auction itself. This raises the question of whether Galaxy might acquire another distressed mining site, similar to its acquisition of Argo's Helios site. Here’s a background story about Galaxy providing DIP loans to Rhodium.
On the topic of miner capitulation, it appears that the worst may be behind us for now. Bitcoin's hashprice has recovered to a relatively stable level above $43/PH/s, a 20% increase from its August low.
Meanwhile, public mining companies continue to race to expand their bitcoin compute power (aka hashrate), often at their own expense and that of others (because the more everybody mines the more difficult it becomes for everyone to mine) as bitcoin’s daily production benchmark keeps dropping, setting an all-time low of 0.7 BTC/EH/s in September.
If the market in October doesn’t perform well, the worst is yet to come for bitcoin's hashprice. So far, “Uptober” doesn’t seem to be living up to its name.
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