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Happy Saturday! It seems like everyone is making noise about mining, and several crypto firms are talking about going public. As always the signal can be found below. Mike Orcutt here, and I'll be your guide. Behind the Headlines Lots of mining news these days! Kentucky’s state legislature passed a law intended to attract cryptocurrency miners to the state. The government in the Pakistani province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is planning to build two cryptocurrency mines. SBI’s crypto subsidiary has opened its bitcoin mining pool to the public. The9 Limited, a Nasdaq-listed Chinese gaming company, purchased $120 million worth of Bitmain’s latest bitcoin miner. And New Universal, a Shenzhen-listed equipment manufacturer, purchased $90 million worth of Filecoin miners. Filecoin miners. Meanwhile, Nvidia confirmed that it had accidentally introduced a way to override the “hash rate limiter” it has added to GPUs to reduce demand for them by cryptocurrency miners. Nvidia competitor AMD said it has no plans to try to limit use of its GPUs by crypto-miners the way Nvidia has.
Speaking of mining, interested in a wilder ride than bitcoin? Try bitcoin mining stocks. Most of them have actually gained more than bitcoin, in percentage terms, during the bull rally. Miners generally hold bitcoin directly but they also must invest in cutting-edge hardware — infrastructure that can skyrocket in value itself during a price run. But how do investors valuing these stocks? How should they be valued? Ryan Weeks recently called around the industry asking those and other pertinent questions. Here’s what he came up with.
Quantifying the use of Tether as a money laundering tool in China: Back in November, Wolfie Zhao reported on a small number of court rulings in China in which individuals had been convicted of knowingly using Tether’s stablecoin USDT to launder criminal proceeds. Recently, he returned to China’s public database of court rulings to search “USDT” once more. And now it appears that convictions for that particular crime have become more common. (PS: Don’t miss Pixiu, Wolfie Zhao’s biweekly newsletter focused on crypto in Asia, with an emphasis on China. Our members-only newsletters are just another reason to subscribe to The Block.)
Coming soon to community banks in the US: bitcoin ATMs? Blue Ridge Bank, a Virginia-based community bank, appears to be the first US bank to let customers buy bitcoin from its ATMs. The platform will rely on software from LibertyX, which will be responsible for verifying that the users are who they say they are. MK Manoylov's story about the deal shows why it wouldn’t be surprising to see other community banks follow Blue Ridge’s lead.
ICYMI: Latin America’s first bitcoin ETF was approved in Brazil. Morgan Stanley is planning to offer its wealth management clients access to bitcoin funds. JPMorgan is reportedly looking for a crypto clearinghouse. Coinbase filed a revised S-1, disclosing that it has registered around 115 shares for its Nasdaq direct listing. Kraken could go public next year via a direct listing. Grayscale added five new crypto investment trusts including Chainlink and Filecoin. British financier Alan Howard was revealed to be the fourth-largest shareholder of CoinShares. eToro plans to go public with a blank check company at a $10.4 billion valuation. A subsidiary of publicly-listed Chinese tech company Meitu bought another $49 million in ETH and BTC. Sotheby’s plans to hold its first NFT sale. Crypto market maker B2C2 launched options and lending products. Austrian neo-broker Bitpanda raised $170 million at a $1.2 billion valuation. Crypto security firm Fireblocks raised $133 million in a Series C. Crypto brokerage FalconX raised $50 million. NFT marketplace OpenSea raised $23 million in a Series A round led by a16z. BitMEX co-founder Ben Delo surrendered to US authorities and was released on $20 million bail. Meanwhile, founder Arthur Hayes intends to surrender next month. The Florida teen behind the high-profile Twitter account hack in July 2020 pleaded guilty to fraud charges. The US Government Services Administration (GSA) auctioned off 0.7501 bitcoin. Signal is now accepting crypto donations. Wyoming’s ‘DAO law’ passed the state senate. The Bank of Japan will start central bank digital currency experiments later this year. Under the Microscope Cryptocurrency industry lobbying. With a focus on the cryptocurrency industry, The Block Research’s Steven Zheng recently dug into the public data that tracks federal lobbying. He identified 25 crypto firms that have been actively lobbying in DC. Since 2014, crypto firms have spent $7.5 million lobbying — but the annual number has grown from $80,000 to $2.35 million in 2020. Find these and many other interesting facts in the full report, which is available via subscription to The Block Research. Off The Block - Ben Munster wrote a new story for Decrypt about trying to get “crazy rich” selling an NFT. Few if any crypto writers are better at generating literally-out-loud-LOLs than Ben. Don't make me compliment him any more than that. Just read it.
 The Money Quote “Financial records will show how much Defendants — who insist they had no idea their conduct was wrongful — enriched themselves relative to other income, which bears on the powerful, personal financial motivation they had to look the other way when confronted with the legal consequences of their conduct.” —The US Securities and Exchange Commission, arguing in a March 17 court letter that it should be allowed to subpoena the financial records of Ripple executives Brad Garlinghouse and Chris Larsen. You are receiving this e-mail because you are subscribed to The Block's free newsletter. If someone shared this newsletter with you, you can easily subscribe to receive it in your inbox here. If you're looking for even more content, we have a separate newsletter for The Block Research, which you can sign-up for here. | 
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