PYMNTS-MonitorEdge-May-2024

Bitcoin Daily: Genesis Digital Assets Buys 20,000 Bitcoin Mining Machines; El Salvador Approves More BTC to Dollar Conversions

Genesis Digital Assets, a bitcoin mining company, has set out to purchase 20,000 new bitcoin mining systems from Canaan, a blockchain hardware giant, according to a press release.

“The bitcoin mining machines from this latest purchase order are part of our ongoing efforts to rapidly scale our bitcoin mining operations in North America and the Nordics where we are focused on energy that comes from renewable sources,” said Genesis Co-Founder and Executive Chair Abdumalik Mirakhmedov in the release.

Adding more mining systems will likely help bitcoin’s hash rate, which is still somewhat in recovery after China began regulating crypto more heavily earlier this year, Decrypt reported.

In other news, El Salvador’s Congress has approved a motion to create a $150 million fund to help make for more conversions from bitcoin to U.S. dollars, Devdiscourse reported.

Those funds will be administered by the state development bank of El Salvador, according to the report.

Meanwhile, decentralized finance (DeFi) company Parallel Finance has raised $22 million in a Series A funding round, The Block reported.

Polychain Capital led the round, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, Slow Ventures, Alameda Research, Blockchain Capital, CMT Digital and Blockchange Ventures participated as well, the report stated. The project is now valued at $150 million.

Parallel Finance, rolled out five months ago, is in testnet on the Polkadot and Kusama networks, according to the report. It offers a new platform for leverage staking and liquidity mining, with the former letting companies borrow against their staking collateral and the latter letting users stake Polkadot tokens to get Parallel’s native tokens.

Founder Yubo Ruan told The Block that the company also plans to launch its mainnet in the fourth quarter of this year. He said the company is looking to hire more engineers and expand its team.

PYMNTS-MonitorEdge-May-2024