Aurelia Butler

HashKey Global achieved profitability within its first two months of launch and has entered the top 10 of global exchanges on CoinGecko’s rankings at the time of this release, becoming one of the fastest-growing licensed exchange globally in 2024. HashKey Global has seen significant growth in trading volume, liquidity, asset quality and user base. The platform will continue delivering a safe and convenient trading experience compliant with regulations for global users.For more details, users can visit: global.hashkey.comAbout HashKey GlobalHashKey Global is one of the flagship global digital asset exchanges under HashKey Group, offering licensed digital asset trading services to users worldwide. HashKey Global has obtained a license from the Bermuda Monetary Authority with the potential to provide mainstream trading and service products such as LaunchPad, contracts and leverage trading.Disclaimer: https://group.hashkey.com/en/disclaimer-globalContactSenior PR ManagerLuna WangHashKey [email protected] article was originally published on Chainwire More

Strength in the dollar weighed on broader crypto prices, as traders remained largely biased towards the greenback in anticipation of key U.S. inflation data this Friday. A reading on first-quarter economic growth is also on tap.Bitcoin rose 0.7% over the past 24 hours to $61,465.7 by 08:29 ET (12:29 GMT). The world’s largest cryptocurrency had fallen as far as $59,000 earlier this week, as risk appetite remained largely negative.Liquidators of the now-defunct crypto exchange Mt. Gox, which had collapsed from a hack in 2014, said this week that they will begin distributing tokens stolen from clients in the first week of July.The liquidators had earlier this year mobilized about $9 billion worth of Bitcoin from cold wallets- an event that was expected to precede a potential distribution. They did not specify in their announcement this week what the scale of the distributions will be.Clients receiving their stolen assets now will do so at a much higher price, which may see them inclined to offload the sell-offs. Such a scenario presents massive selling pressure on Bitcoin.Bitcoin Cash, which will also be distributed by Mt Gox, was also nursing steep losses this week.The token was already under pressure from reports suggesting that German authorities had also begun selling thousands of Bitcoin confiscated from a piracy website. Broader sentiment towards crypto was already under pressure from waning risk appetite, as traders pivoted into stabler assets such as the dollar amid fears of high U.S. interest rates. Crypto investment products, specifically Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, were nursing two weeks of steep outflows. Among broader crypto markets, altcoins marked some gains this week as the potential for increased selling pressure on Bitcoin spurred some flows into other crypto assets. World no.2 token Ether rose 0.2% to $3,378.09, while SOL and ADA added 0.3% and 0.6%, respectively.XRP also lagged, dropping 0.5%.Among meme tokens, SHIB climbed 0.8%, while DOGE added 0.6%.Crypto markets could face a surge in volatility at the end of this week as a significant amount of Bitcoin and Ether options is set to expire on the leading derivatives exchange, Deribit.Specifically, BTC and ETH options worth $6.68 billion and $3.5 billion, respectively, will expire on Friday at 08:00 UTC. This represents over 40% of the current cumulative open interest, which exceeds $23 billion.Large quarterly expiries often lead to increased volatility due to higher trading volumes and the closing or rollover of positions.”As we approach Friday’s large quarterly expiry, potentially influenced by ‘quadruple witching’ and related volatility in U.S. stock markets, over 25% of Deribit open interest is set to expire in-the-money, equating to over $2.7 billion. The total notional size of the expiry is over $10 billion,” Deribit CEO said in an interview with CoinDesk.Options are derivative contracts that grant the holder the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell the underlying asset at a predetermined price on or before a specific date.A call option gives the right to buy, while a put option gives the right to sell. On Deribit, each options contract represents one BTC or ETH. More

BTIG’s BTC mining basket, comprising 14 companies, has an aggregate hash rate of about 138 EH, which represents 23% of the global hash rate. The hash rate is expected to grow to 153 EH by 2025, driven by new rigs that improve fleet efficiency.Bitcoin’s price currently hovers around $62,000, up 45% year-to-date, with miners’ margins benefiting from higher prices. The global hash rate averaged 582 EH in June, down from 600 EH in May but up 57% from last year. Network difficulty has steadily increased, up 60% over the past year and 16% year-to-date.Meanwhile, Core Scientific announced a 200MW high-performance computing (HPC) contract with CoreWeave, followed by an additional 70MW of data center contracts. This news has driven Core Scientific’s stock up by nearly 90% in recent weeks. BTIG highlighted that the shift to fixed-price multi-year contracts allowed some miners to decouple from Bitcoin prices, which have dropped about 11% since early June.“The pivot to fixed-price multi-year contracts has seen CORZ and some miners decouple from the BTC price, with Terawulf up over 100% and Iris up around 70% over this period,” BTIG stated.The race for power access has intensified among publicly listed BTC miners due to increasing demand from data center companies. “For every 100MW of power converted or powered-up for HPC, that’s 5-6 EH less for the global hash,” BTIG noted.During site visits to Riot’s Corsicana facility, which targets around 1GW, and Core Scientific’s Denton facility, BTIG observed that the industrialization of BTC mining has arrived. Riot’s Corsicana facility is expected to reach 31 EH by the end of this year and 41 EH by 2025.The report shed light on Bitdeer’s investor discussions, which revealed a focus on designing mining rigs and converting existing facilities for HPC computing. “The low-hanging fruit is its Washington facility, near a Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) data center, with potential conversions in Ohio and Norway,” BTIG reported.BTIG estimates the value of Core Scientific’s 286MW of fixed HPC contracts at $9-$10 per share, assuming a 15x EBITDA multiple. “Data center REITs are trading at about 20x EBITDA on 2025,” BTIG added. With a target of 500MW for HPC by 2028, BTIG expects an additional $5 per share value, justifying the new price target of $15. More

Mt. Gox’s trustee will reportedly start returning more than 141,900 BTC, valued at around $8.7 billion, to creditors beginning in July. Bitcoin reached a record high near $74,000 in mid-March, driven by a surge of interest in new spot exchange-traded funds, but its price has since fallen.”While it’s uncertain how much of the distributed BTC will be sold by creditors, we do not expect all or even most of the coins to be sold in the short term,” H.C. Wainwright analysts commented. “Many of these early investors in BTC have a hodl mentality and very low cost bases.”Elsewhere, shares of AI-linked bitcoin miners outperformed pure-play miners, rising by 11.5% compared to a 1.4% increase for the latter group. This surge follows several announcements, including a $150 million investment by Coatue into Hut 8 Corp (NASDAQ:HUT) via a convertible note to build data center infrastructure focused on AI. Additionally, two other public miners disclosed expanded contracts with existing AI customers.”AI contracts come with recurring, high-margin revenue streams that are not susceptible to BTC price fluctuations,” the analysts noted. “BTC miners are leveraging their infrastructure capacity to support AI compute, attracting new tech investors in the process.”Last Thursday, Nasdaq-listed software firm MicroStrategy (NASDAQ:MSTR) acquired an additional 11,931 BTC for $786 million, at an average price of about $65,900 per coin. With this latest acquisition, MicroStrategy’s total holdings have increased to 226,331 tokens, worth just under $14 billion. The largest corporate holder of bitcoin invested over $8.3 billion into the original cryptocurrency since 2020.In terms of hardware advancements, Bitmain unveiled its latest Antminer S21 series rigs at the World Digital Mining Summit in Las Vegas. The air-cooled S21 XP boasts 270 TH/s of computing power with an efficiency rating of 13.5 J/TH, a 10% improvement over the S21 Pro. Additionally, Bitmain announced the S21 XP Hydro, a hydro-cooled model with 473 TH/s and an efficiency rating of 12 J/TH. These new rigs are expected to begin shipping in Q4 2024.“Mining stocks declined by a more modest 1.3%. The network hash rate fell by 1.3% to 574 EH/s, and network difficulty remained virtually unchanged at 83.7T. Hashprices dropped 7.2% to $0.05/TH/day due to lower BTC prices,” H.C. Wainwright wrote. More