CleanSpark (NASDAQ:CLSK), a sustainable bitcoin mining company, has moved its entire hashrate to Foundry Digital’s North American mining pool with plans to triple its computing power by next fall.
Pools combine the mining power of multiple customers to increase the probability and frequency of mining bitcoin. CleanSpark has added 1 exahash per second (EH/s) of computing power, generated by 10,000 of the latest-generation bitcoin mining machines, to the Foundry USA Pool. The company plans to continue with machine deployments to reach its goal of 2 EH/s by the end of 2021 and 3 EH/s by fall 2022.
The USA Pool of Foundry, a subsidiary of CoinDesk parent Digital Currency Group, focuses on institutional mining businesses and integrates with cryptocurrency prime broker Genesis, another DCG-owned company, to provide treasury management services. Foundry USA is the first North American pool to offer the Full-Pay-Per-Share (FPPS) payout method without relying on an external party. FPPS pays miners the expected block reward from bitcoin plus the associated transaction fees. In return, the pool operator is paid a small fee. Foundry USA’s major customers include Bit Digital, Hive, Greenridge, and Foundry itself.
“Mining pools historically have not been as transparent in the way they calculate their miners’ earnings,” said Bernardo Schucman, senior vice president of mining for CleanSpark, in a press release. “Foundry USA Pool is an exception, however. Being an American mining pool with transparent and compliant methods, it provides all stakeholders with full disclosure of their earnings.”
CleanSpark’s transition continues the mining push that ramped up earlier this year as bitcoin’s hashrate, which measures the network’s total power consumption and mining output, hit record highs. In the recent third-quarter earnings report, CleanSpark said overall sales more than tripled compared with the same period last year to $11.92 million. Digital currency mining accounted for nearly three-quarters of that revenue.
CleanSpark announced the purchase of 22,680 bitcoin mining machines in April, with the first batch of deliveries scheduled for late summer. The company paid $6.6 million in August to acquire its second data center in Georgia and soon after announced plans to invest $145 million into the facility and surrounding community. The data center is expected to provide 20 megawatts of additional power, enough to install 6,000 more mining machines, when full operations begin later this year.
