mining

Paraguayan authorities shut down two illegal cryptocurrency mining facilities in Upper Paraná province within a week, seizing a total of 35 mining machines. One mining site, which was discovered on September 17, illegally drew electricity through a line without an installed meter, resulting in the confiscation of 10 ASIC mining machines, with related costs and fines totaling approximately $30,000.Another operation on September 12 seized 25 mining machines. The Paraguayan House of Representatives has passed a resolution requiring the National Electricity Administration to submit a report on the electricity consumption, electricity prices, and regulatory situation of the cryptocurrency mining industry.

According to CoinDesk, the mining company Fortitude, focused on Zcash mining, has appointed former Hut 8 CEO Jaime Leverton as CEO and plans to go public on Nasdaq through a merger with HeartSciences. Andrea Childs will serve as COO.In the first half of 2026, Fortitude is expected to produce approximately 28% of the total ZEC output for the same period, with second-quarter revenue of $20.9 million. The implied valuation of the merged company may be at least $400 million.

Paradigm founder Matt Huang commented on Zcash via Twitter. He stated that all blockchain ecosystems face the long-term funding challenge for public goods, and funding developer funds through inflation is a relatively elegant mechanism; how funds are allocated can be discussed and continuously improved. In the context of accelerating AI network attack capabilities and advancements in quantum computing, developer funds remain very important.Regarding governance, Matt Huang mentioned that as Zcash is increasingly accepted by more users as a complementary asset to Bitcoin for privacy, voting solely based on the amount of tokens held will bring uncertainty and may limit its long-term trust as a monetary asset. The project is better off combining token-based voting with other forms of governance.

Recently, Ethereum Classic experienced a social engineering incident involving the Core-Geth client. The unreviewed ethereumclassic/core-geth v1.13.0 was released on September 14 and was promoted as a security update. A few mining pool nodes temporarily switched to this version but have since reverted to the long-term maintained etclabscore/core-geth v1.12.23.This unreviewed version modified key logic such as chain selection and node discovery, posing a potential risk of network split; the incident did not result in block loss, chain reorganization, fund loss, or service interruption.

According to Bloomberg, due to the impact of the El Niño phenomenon, the inflow to Ethiopia's hydropower dams has significantly decreased, and Ethiopian Electric Power Corp has reduced electricity supply to the Bitcoin mining industry by three-quarters.Data shows that Bitcoin mining companies contributed 35% of the company's revenue in the past fiscal year, with their electricity consumption accounting for nearly one-third of the country's total power generation (9,730 megawatts). This large-scale power restriction may severely impact the operations of local mining companies.

According to Bitcoin News monitoring, a miner from Braiins Solo discovered block number 966351, receiving a full block reward of 3.147 BTC, approximately equivalent to $244,900.Currently, the top five mining pools control 78.31% of the hash rate; the last independent block was produced on August 2, from Solo CKPool.

Bitget launched the "Newcomer Gold Digging 2.0" contract event, which runs from September 14 to September 21. During the event, both new and existing users can complete specified net recharge, contract trading, and friend invitation tasks to receive tiered mystery box rewards, with a maximum of 18 mystery boxes available.The mystery box prize pool includes physical gold gifts such as XAUT airdrops and Lai Cai gold coins, with a winning rate of 100%. Users who meet the cumulative trading volume criteria can also receive an additional 5g gold ingot. For more details, please refer to the Bitget official platform.

According to Reuters, Mexican authorities discovered an illegal cryptocurrency mining operation in a remote mountainous building in Tehuacán, Puebla, where 300 GPUs, 80 medium-voltage terminals, and 8 satellite antennas were found on-site. Authorities are investigating whether the operation is stealing electricity from a nearby hydroelectric power station.This is the fourth similar crypto farm discovered in the area since early last year, with three others found near a hydroelectric power station in northern Puebla last year. Local residents reported that the noise from the equipment can be heard from a kilometer away. Mexican security analyst David Saucedo stated that drug trafficking groups seem to have reached a new level of sophistication, as establishing such operations requires technical expertise and support from well-funded groups.Chainalysis Latin America expert Caio Motta pointed out that such operations are usually located in areas with extremely low electricity prices or within the reach of organized crime to steal electricity and establish large-scale mining infrastructure.

Zach Pandl, the research director at Grayscale, pointed out that Zcash, as a Bitcoin-like digital currency with privacy features, currently has lucrative mining profits. Although Bitcoin network miners earn about $35 million daily, far exceeding Zcash's approximately $2 million, the daily revenue per mining machine for Zcash is about twice that of Bitcoin, with revenue per megawatt-hour approximately four times that of Bitcoin, even surpassing some AI/high-performance computing cloud services.Driven by the strong performance of token prices, Zcash's overall mining activity has increased more than 2.5 times this year, forming a virtuous cycle of "price increase --- mining increase --- network security enhancement --- supporting price." Pandl believes that at the current valuation, Zcash mining remains attractive and continues to strengthen its network security.

Pine Analytics released the Zcash Q3 2026 report. Ironwood was activated on July 28 at block 3,428,143, and within five weeks, holders migrated 87% of their Orchard balance, with the new pool holding 3.84M ZEC as of August 31. The shielded supply increased by 9.9% to 4.86M ZEC, with the shielded ratio rebounding from 26.3% to 28.7%, recovering 440K from the 745K unshielded ZEC in June.The price of ZEC rose from $407 on June 30 to $836 on August 31, an increase of 106%. Grayscale ZCSH converted to a spot ETF, with assets growing from $155 million to $346 million. Mining difficulty rose by 35%, reaching an all-time high, with two corporate miners committing approximately $65 million in hash power. NU7 has no mainnet height yet, and holders will vote until September 14 to decide whether to launch before September 30 with a 25-second block time and smooth issuance; there are still 470K ZEC remaining in Orchard.

According to Decrypt, the Mexican federal prosecutor, in conjunction with the Navy and Puebla state police, conducted a raid on a property in the remote mountainous area of Tlaola, Puebla, seizing approximately 300 cryptocurrency mining machines, as well as transformers, medium-voltage terminals, and satellite internet antennas.The investigation revealed that the mining operation illegally tapped into the grid of the Nuevo Necaxa hydroelectric power station, and authorities have filed charges for "theft of electricity." Currently, forensic accountants are tracing the source of the hardware funding, and money laundering suspicions have not been ruled out. Data from the Mexican Federal Electricity Commission shows that from January to July 2024, non-technical electricity losses reached up to 6,346 gigawatt-hours, valued at approximately 13.8 billion pesos (about 817 million USD).

Bitcoin mining company CleanSpark (Nasdaq: CLSK) announced its unaudited operational data for the period ending August 31, 2026. In August, it mined a total of 593 BTC, with a cumulative output of 4,903 BTC for the year. The operational hash rate reached 50 EH/s, with an overall energy efficiency ratio of 16.07 J/Th, and the total contracted power capacity was 1.8 GW (with 808 MW already utilized).In terms of treasury, its total Bitcoin holdings as of the end of August were 13,703 BTC. In August, it sold a total of 821 BTC through spot sales, call option exercises, and delta-neutral basis trading, achieving an average realized price of $65,420. CleanSpark is accelerating the construction of its high-performance computing data center in Sandersville, Georgia, which has signed long-term lease agreements totaling $6.6 billion with high-rated technology tenants for 20 years.

Quantus founder and CEO Yuvi Lightman posted on X that the anti-quantum blockchain Quantus mainnet will go live on September 9 (Wednesday). The only way to acquire tokens at the launch is through mining, and liquidity and tradability will be available a few weeks later.The team has merged Immunefi security work into the public code repository and completed all fixes from the audit competition. The chain supports ML-DSA-65 and ML-DSA-87, binding each signature to its context according to FIPS 204 standards, failing and closing multi-signature transactions that cannot be decoded, and strengthening the network stack to resist denial-of-service attacks. The team has completed a full-process drill on the global rehearsal mainnet covering the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Australia, producing signed binaries through an automated pipeline, deploying multi-region bootnodes and dedicated RPC nodes as infrastructure as code, and reducing indexer memory usage from over 90% to about 26%.In addition, Quantus has launched a registration page, completed a website redesign, Keystone hardware wallet supports multiple accounts, and released CLI v2.1.3 and miner v4.0.2. Quantum & Privacy Day will be co-hosted with NEAR in Singapore on October 8, coinciding with Token2049.

The town of Plattsburgh, New York, held a public hearing to discuss a temporary land use moratorium on "high energy consumption computing facilities" such as cryptocurrency mining and AI data centers. If the proposal is approved, it will pause the approval of related operational applications that consume 300 kilowatts or more for 12 months. As of Tuesday, the mayor has not yet approved the moratorium, and the city council plans to meet again on September 17.Plattsburgh is one of the first areas in the United States to implement a ban on Bitcoin mining, having enacted an 18-month moratorium in 2018 due to residents' concerns about electricity costs. Now, with rising mining difficulty, increasing electricity costs, and falling token prices, many cryptocurrency mining companies have turned to AI and high-performance computing, prompting local governments to reconsider restrictions on high energy consumption facilities.

According to PR Newswire, Canaan Inc. (NASDAQ: CAN) announced its unaudited financial results for the three months ended June 30, 2026. Total revenue for the second quarter was $31.9 million, down from $62.7 million in the first quarter and $100.2 million in the same period of 2025, with product revenue of $13.6 million, mining revenue of $17.7 million, and other revenue of $600,000.Cost of revenue for the quarter was $61.2 million, resulting in a gross loss of $29.3 million, operating expenses of $40.1 million, an operating loss of $69.5 million, and a net loss of $97.6 million. Non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA loss was $74.9 million. Loss from changes in the fair value of cryptocurrencies was $9.3 million, impairment of property, equipment, and software was $9.2 million, and total inventory write-downs, prepaid expense write-downs, and inventory purchase commitment reserves amounted to $25.3 million.The company's self-operated installed mining capacity (non-joint venture) was 10.05 EH/s, an increase of 23.3% year-over-year, with an all-in electricity cost of approximately $0.043 per kilowatt-hour, mining 243 bitcoins during the quarter. Cryptocurrency reserves reached 1,915 bitcoins and 3,952 ethers. As of September 8, 2026, the company repurchased approximately 16.4 million ADS for a total of $7.4 million. The ABC project holds a 49% stake, with an installed capacity of 4.85 EH/s as of the end of July 2026.

Cobo co-founder and CEO Shen Yu recalled that he has a deep shadow over ZEC. When ZEC's mainnet launched in 2016, BitMEX set the price ceiling at 10 BTC, which also became the historical high point for ZEC.He stated that shortly after starting to mine on the night of the launch, the transformer of the GPU mining farm was struck by lightning, and since then, ZEC has not appeared in his personal wallet again.

According to the official announcement, Bitget has launched the pre-market perpetual contracts for retail users, H100 and B200, which are linked to the rental price index of NVIDIA H100 and B200 GPUs, respectively, quoted in USD per GPU hour.Bitget's pre-market perpetual contracts further extend the trading targets into the AI computing power field. By tracking the GPU rental market index price, users can participate in the price discovery of global GPU rental prices and the AI infrastructure market in advance, capturing potential trading opportunities brought by changes in demand for high-performance GPUs such as H100 and B200. The product adopts a perpetual contract model settled in USDT, supports up to 10x leverage, and allows trading 24/7.

According to Bitcoin.com, the Swedish Tax Agency has issued tax reassessments and fines totaling approximately $56.5 million (around 540 million Swedish Krona) to six cryptocurrency mining companies in Boden, accusing them of disguising their mining operations through complex corporate structures and illegally obtaining tax benefits for data centers.This enforcement action stems from a comprehensive industry audit covering 2024 to 2026, with a total of nine mining companies nationwide being pursued for over $50 million in taxes, with the six companies in Boden accounting for the vast majority. Among them, Bikupan Datacenter, a subsidiary of Hive Digital, has initiated financial restructuring due to its inability to pay taxes and has appealed the tax ruling to the Supreme Administrative Court. A previous investigation by the public broadcaster SVT Norrbotten revealed that cryptocurrency mining companies have caused the Swedish government to lose approximately $100 million in tax revenue.

The cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex posted on X that the Bitcoin miner position index is currently -1.2, well below its annual average.Miners are holding supply, even though the breakthrough in August briefly pushed it up to 2.8. An index above 2 means that miners are selling again, and current selling activity is relatively sluggish.