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Giga Energy, a bitcoin mining infrastructure startup focused on utilizing wasted natural gas as a power source, is raising $10 million in Series A funding.

The funding will help the Texas-based startup expand its operations in the U.S. and beyond, according to a pitch deck obtained by The Block. Giga Energy has previously raised $3.6 million in total funding, per the deck.

A source with direct knowledge of the matter confirmed that Giga Energy is raising $10 million in Series A funding and has previously raised $3.6 million in two rounds — $1.1 million pre-seed in August 2021 and $2.5 million seed in March 2022. Investors in those rounds included Magic Internet Money and Ten31.

Giga Energy’s pre-money valuation at the time of the seed round was $30 million, the source added.

Stranded flared gas 

Giga Energy was founded in 2019 by Matt Lohstroh and his friend and high school classmate Brent Whitehead. The duo, both 20 at the time, hit upon surplus natural gas as a power source to mine bitcoin. Later they ventured into the infrastructure space, manufacturing their own natural gas generators. As for its business model, Giga’s revenue comes from mining bitcoin as well as selling electricity, generators and rack space. 

The startup made $4.6 million in total revenue last year, according to the deck. That’s a big jump from its 2021 revenue of $800,000 when it was only mining bitcoin. Its revenue is growing at 50% quarter-on-quarter, according to the deck. 

Out of its targeted $10 million raise, Giga will use nearly $6 million for manufacturing generators and the rest for other expenses, including payroll, research and development and data centers, per the deck.

With expected fresh capital in hand, Giga Energy plans expansion in the U.S. states of Mississippi, Utah, Ohio and North Dakota, as well as across the world, including Argentina, Ecuador, Bahrain, Egypt and the U.A.E. Giga Energy currently has operations in Texas and Louisiana.

Giga Energy declined to comment on this story when contacted.

The bitcoin mining sector is seeing an increased amount of funding lately. Last month, crypto infrastructure company Blockstream raised $125 million in convertible note and secured loan financing to expand its bitcoin mining hosting services. Earlier this week, crypto miner Pow.re secured a $9.2 million Series A round and a separate $18 million strategic investment, while Bitcoin miner TeraWulf also raised $32 million from a public equity offering.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Cross-chain margin platform Prime Protocol launched its testnet on Arbitrum today, and will be the first cross-chain brokerage that allows users to take out margin on their entire account — regardless of what chain they are on.

This is beneficial for users because it reduces liquidation and bridge hack risk, Prime Protocol founder Colton Conley told The Block.

Prime Protocol is using Axelar’s messaging technology to enable cross-chain transactions. It is also integrated with Wormhole, which gives Prime Protocol connectivity with non-Ethereum based chains.

It does not currently have a token live, but may at some point in the future, Conley said. Once live, it plans to run incentives to bootstrap liquidity. There may be an airdrop or some type of reward for people who participate on its testnet, he added.

Many protocols — such as Polygon’s flagship derivatives exchange Gains Network — have added support for Ethereum scaling platform Arbitrum recently. Arbitrum is an Ethereum Layer 2 that currently has the highest market share in the sector, according to L2Beat. Prime Protocol is also integrated with Polygon, BNB Chain, Avalanche and Fantom.

Cross-chain applications have started to pick up some traction with interoperability platforms such as LayerZero, Axelar and Wormhole further along in their development. After some growing pains, building applications that mitigate the need to bridge are becoming more of a reality.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Bitcoin miner TeraWulf raised $32 million from a public equity offering.

The company also reached a “binding agreement in principle” with its existing lenders to restructure its debt, which was subject to the equity capital raise, it said Thursday.

“In reaching these achievements, we believe more than ever that TeraWulf is positioned to deliver profitable growth and compelling returns,” said CEO Paul Prager. “We are confident in our ability to raise additional funds needed to obtain debt relief and committed to creating shareholder value.”

Following the deals, the company expects to achieve free cash flow. It will use the net proceeds to build out its facilities in New York and Pennsylvania and for other general purposes.

The debt restructuring will replace the amortization of a term loan with a free cash flow sweep mechanism through April 2024, subject to the TeraWulf raising the requisite amount of equity proceeds by March 15.

The company announced that its co-founders Paul Prager and Nazar Khan, chief operating officer, purchased $2.5 million in a private placement at a market price of $1.05 per share.

It also said that it received $4.25 million in proceeds from the exercise of certain private placement warrants issued in December 2022.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

The Uniswap Foundation’s executive director said a cross-chain bridge governance vote garnered “more attention than any Uniswap proposal in recent memory.”

Devin Walsh’s post came after a spirited debate over which bridge — a protocol used to connect blockchains — will be used to tie Uniswap with Binance’s BNB Chain. Wormhole prevailed in a community “temperature check” that attracted significant involvement, both publicly and behind the scenes, from some of DeFi’s most deep-pocketed backers, including a16z and Jump.

Walsh wrote that the “final Governance vote will move forward with the results of the most recent Snapshot Poll.”

“In other words, no votes voiced outside of the Snapshot poll will be counted in the results,” Walsh continued. “The proposal to deploy Uniswap v3 on BNB Chain will go forward to the final governance vote with Wormhole as the selected bridge.”

Second place

LayerZero, which came in second place in the vote, argued in a statement Tuesday that, in light of sentiments expressed by Uniswap stakeholders, it was the “preferred bridge” out of the group. The startup also argued that the foundation should hold a vote with both Wormhole and LayerZero as options.

In her post, Walsh wrote that the foundation “saw the clear opportunity to create a better process for future cross-chain deployment proposals” and invited feedback on a proposal for a cross-chain bridge assessment group.

Walsh said that the debate over the bridge selection “highlighted the urgent need for a better process to be implemented for bridge selection” as well as more research “into bridges for governance, and into bridge-agnostic solutions for protocols.”

“We hope our learnings, and the new process we create from here, will contribute to the creation of more seamless, standard processes and technological solutions that other protocols can benefit from as they consider deploying across other chains,” she wrote.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Crypto prices soared after the market opened on Thursday, as traders responded to the Federal Reserve’s interest rate decision yesterday with a bullish sentiment.

Bitcoin rose 3.5% to $23,730 around 9:50 a.m. EST, according to TradingView data, pushing toward the upper bound of the $15,000-$25,000 range within which it has traded for around eight months.

BTCUSD chart by TradingView

Ether also climbed significantly by 6.4% to around $1,685. Polygon’s MATIC rose 13%, Avalanche’s AVAX was up 17.9%, Uniswap’s UNI was up 9%, and Cardano’s ADA rose 6%. BNB was also up 6%.

Dog-themed meme coins rose less dramatically, with Dogecoin and Shiba Inu up 2.4% and 4.2%, respectively. 

“We are seeing some positive correlation in crypto with the rally in risk assets,” says Stephane Oullette, CEO of FRNT Financial.

Because the FOMC decision was “incrementally dovish,” Oullette said, it has partially validated the thesis, among some speculators, that “bitcoin has bottomed.”

Crypto-related stocks also rose significantly after the market opened.

Silvergate shares rose 21.6% to around $19 by 10 a.m., according to Nasdaq data, rising alongside most other crypto stocks.

Jack Dorsey’s Block increased 4.2% to trade around $87, while MicroStrategy increased 4.6%. Coinbase was up significantly, increasing by 10%.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Crypto exchange Kraken is shutting its Abu Dhabi office and winding down support for the United Arab Emirates’s local currency.

“As part of a recent review, we have decided to suspend AED (dirham) support,” a Kraken spokesperson said to The Block. “All clients, including in MENA and the UAE, will continue to be able to use all of Kraken’s other products and services as normal.”

Bloomberg first reported the news. The publication noted that a registry for Abu Dhabi Global Market no longer showed an active entity in Kraken’s name. The exchange received a crypto license in Abu Dhabi in April 2022.

Kraken recently laid off around 30% of its global workforce. The pullback in the MENA region impacted eight members of staff, a spokesperson said.

Benjamin Ampen, managing director for MENA, will stay with the exchange, according to Bloomberg.

“We have already notified impacted clients of this recent change, and our best-in-class client support teams continue to offer our services to ensure a smooth trading experience,” a Kraken spokesperson said.

Both Kraken and Coinbase also shut down operations in Japan recently. Kraken is one several crypto exchanges implementing layoffs as a cost-cutting measure.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Users of the popular play-to-earn game Axie Infinity can now stake their in-game assets to earn rewards. 

Ronin Network, the firm building the Ronin blockchain that Axie is built on, partnered with the crypto lender MetaLend to facilitate the loans. Currently, 1,587 Ronin-based NFTs are being used as collateral on MetaLend, according to the firm’s website. 

Users can stake their land and NFTs on-chain, with the ability to stake Axie Infinity Shards (AXS), the governance token to the Axie Infinity ecosystem, coming soon. One must assess the value of their digital assets using the MetaLend-provided calculator and borrow ETH against the asset for up to 30% of the asset’s value before earning a staking reward. MetaTech takes a 1% fee. 

MetaLend and Ronin Network first announced their partnership on Jan. 31.

MetaLend previously raised $5 million in a seed funding round led by Pantera Capital, with additional participation from Collab+Currency and the gaming guild Ancient8.  

At its peak, Axie Infinity brought in $215 million in weekly trading volume on Aug. 8, 2021, according to The Block’s Data Dashboard. However, instability in the game’s tokenomics caused its in-game currencies to depreciate in value. 

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Bitcoin miner CleanSpark mined 697 BTC in January, doubling its production from the previous month.

“We had a banner month, and not just because we mined a record number of bitcoin,” CEO Zach Bradford said. “We also had our most reliable month ever, achieving 98% uptime across all of our sites.

The company reached a hash rate of 6.6 EH/s, up 7% month-over-month, ramping up capacity after acquiring multiple sites and thousands of machines at discounted prices last year from troubled miners.

The company sold 624 BTC (around $11.9 million) throughout the month to fund operations and growth. It owned 301 BTC as of Jan. 31.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Ethereum wallet provider MetaMask introduced new security and privacy functions for new and existing users, while making it easier for them to change their RPC providers.

MetaMask has introduced a range of features that the project says will give users more control over their data, according to an announcement on Feb. 2. These features include the ability to toggle on or off particular settings that control the transfer of user data to third-party services. These services help users to avoid falling victim to phishing attacks and they also help to decode incoming transactions.

It also made it easier to switch RPC (remote procedure call) providers. RPC providers offer nodes that allow apps like MetaMask to connect to blockchains, enabling such apps to broadcast user transactions to supported network. Users now have a more convenient way to set their preferred RPC provider rather than using Infura, the default one on MetaMask.

To do so, MetaMask said new users can go to “set advanced privacy settings” to change their RPC provider. Existing users can find this option under “settings,” the announcement added.

This update comes after ConsenSys came under some scrutiny for collecting MetaMask user data via Infura. ConsenSys is an Ethereum software company that owns both MetaMask and Infura. This admission threw up privacy concerns from crypto participants.

ConsenSys clarified that it did not collect user data if they used other RPC providers. Users have been able to set alternative RPC endpoints on their MetaMask before this current update.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Layer 2 Ethereum scaling solution Metis has integrated with crypto payment gateway Banxa, enabling Metis users to access Banxa’s fiat-to-crypto on-and-off ramp and supported cryptocurrencies, including ether, wBTC, aave, link and dai.

A survey by The Ascent in June last year found more than 46.5 million Americans planned to purchase cryptocurrency over the subsequent 12 months. Yet, 24% of Americans claim not to understand crypto or digital wallets, and another 17% said they had not invested in digital assets as they were unsure how.

Metis’s integration with Banxa aims to simplify that crypto onboarding process, particularly into Layer 2, reducing complexity for users in an attempt to make cryptocurrency more user-friendly and easily accessible for the next wave of adopters.

“We are always striving to propel the industry forward and accelerate the adoption of digital assets and blockchain technology,” said Metis CEO and co-founder Elena Sinelnikova in a statement. “In many ways, adoption begins with simplification of the technology and education around the potential that web3 represents,” she added.

As the world’s first listed cryptocurrency payment gateway provider, Banxa uses a global network of local payment solutions paired with the necessary crypto licenses to facilitate low-fee, frictionless access to the crypto market in a compliant way.

“Metis represents one of the most popular Layer 2 solutions, and we feel strongly that, together, we can accelerate DeFi’s mass adoption,” said Banxa CCO Josh D’Ambrosio.

It’s the second integration for Metis in two weeks, having partnered with cross-chain bridge protocol Stargate on Jan. 19, aiming to help Metis users leverage the benefits of DeFi across multiple chains.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.