Matthew Yamamoto

On Tuesday, MoneyGram announced its 4Q19 financial results. Within the press release, the remittance company stated that it had received $8.9 million in fees from distributed ledger startup Ripple within the quarter, up from the $2.4 million in fees recognized during  3Q19. “Revenue was $323.7 million, a decline of 6% from the fourth quarter 2018. […]

The Block takes a closer look at the different equipment depreciation schedules of bitcoin mining companies.

On Wednesday after the close, Overstock quietly announced the departure of one of its rising stars, Kamelia Aryafar. You might have missed it as the press release was inconspicuously titled.  “Overstock announces the changes to its Board of Directors.” Still, it went on:  “[Aryafar] has resigned from her seat on the board and her executive […]

Despite bitcoin prices surging, shares of ASIC manufacturer, Canaan, continue to fall. Since its IPO back in November, Canaan’s stock price has fallen over 50%, and on Tuesday, it achieved a new all-time low of $4.31 a share. Source: TradingView Headwinds caused by the coronavirus outbreak have impacted many Chinese businesses. Bitcoin mining manufacturers have been […]

Despite a sizable increase in operations over the last month, Argo Blockchain, a London-based mining company, trades at a significant discount to its peers. In August 2018, the company raised about $32.5 million through an IPO on the LSE. Since then, the company has utilized that capital to expand its mining operations within Canada. Argo […]

Just off the heels of its IPO in November, crypto-friendly Silvergate Bank reported its first quarterly earnings as a public company last Wednesday with mixed results coming from its digital currency initiative. While the number of the bank’s clients reached new heights, deposits fell by 4% sequentially to $1.25 billion. The transaction volume of its […]

Hut 8 is one of the largest publicly traded bitcoin mining companies with industrial scale operations in Canada. On Tuesday, the company made an announcement detailing some pretty impactful changes including: Andrew Kiguel stepping down as CEO Amended agreement with Bitfury Refinancing of its debt; replacing its loan with Bitfury with a new bitcoin-collateralized loan […]

Competition between crypto-friendly banks, Signature and Silvergate, continues to heat up. On Tuesday, Signature Bank reported a $1 billion sequential increase in non-interest bearing deposits for 4Q19. Typically, securing low-cost deposits are hard to come by. For crypto-friendly banks, however, that’s a different story as struggles to find banking partners have led cryptocurrency-related businesses to […]

Are bitcoin miners pricing in the effects of the block reward halving? Declining prices of the Antminer S9’s may suggest that miners expect profitability to take a hit with the bitcoin per-block subsidy falling from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC come May. We gathered the listing prices from Kaboomracks – one of a handful of mining […]

Despite disappointing trade volumes for the back half of last year, the battle for market dominance between exchanges rages on. While many have tried to improve the customer experience by expanding their product offering (ie: derivatives, otc, custody), Poloniex’s strategy, on the other hand, appears to be around providing low trading fees. If you recall, […]

With the start of a new year, we revisit the topic of whether there is a correlation between the returns on blockchain-related stocks and bitcoin. Similar to our report in July, we analyzed the stocks included in Amplify’s Blok ETF, an actively managed ETF that contains companies involved in the development and utilization of blockchain […]

So what, exactly, is happening with Bitmain’s Texas facility? The status of what is supposed to be Bitmain’s largest mining project to date is rather unclear. If you recall, Bitmain had taken over an old aluminum-smelting plant in mid-2018, promising to build the world’s largest mining facility, which would in turn create hundreds of jobs for […]

As we approach the halving – the term used to describe the drop in the bitcoin per-block subsidy from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC, scheduled to take place this spring – it becomes increasingly important to monitor the financial strength of the mining industry. With the majority of the bitcoin hash rate existing in China, bitcoin […]

As bitcoin’s 2020 block reward halving quickly approaches, confusion on the event’s impact on miners hangs over the digital asset market.  In an attempt to bring more clarity, I humbly offer my predictions for what’s to come in 2020. Halvening First, the halving – in which the number of bitcoins generated with each block reward […]

Following a slight decline in Bitmain’s market dominance, the newly-crowned CEO and sole chairman of the company, Jihan Wu, recently announced Bitmain’s new customer acquisition strategy. As reported by Coindesk, the sales strategy would add three new components to its existing ASIC mining hardware business: Credit sales to large customers Co-mining agreements that cover electricity […]

It was a volatility event that was unusual even for the crypto world. The price of Matic, the native token of blockchain scalability project Matic Network, collapsed 66% Monday evening in under an hour — falling from $0.034 to a low of $0.011 between 7:51 and 8:26 p.m. EST.  Matic Network released a blog post […]

On Thursday, the IRS Criminal Investigation Division (CI) released its annual review for fiscal 2019. Within the report, both CI’s chief and deputy chief emphasized the division’s focus on cryptocurrency-related cybercrimes. “We are leading the world in our ability to trace virtual currency in financial investigations while still working our bread and butter tax enforcement […]

The Canadian mining company, Hut 8, reported its 3Q19 earnings last month. Since its inception in December 2017, the company has built up its operations to include a total of 94 BlockBox AC data centers spread across two mining farms in the province of Alberta. Management estimates that its data centers have an aggregate operating […]

On Thursday, DigixGlobal announced that it would be introducing a quarterly dissolution mechanism to DigixDAO. Every 3 months, DigixDAO (DGD) token holders will now have the opportunity to vote on a ‘full dissolution’ proposal beginning in 1Q20. If passed, the DAO would be shut down and its entire treasury balance of 386,250 ETH (worth approximately […]

DigixGlobal, the company behind one of Ethereum’s earliest ICOs, DigixDAO (DGD), is considering a full liquidation of its treasury and returning the remaining funds back to DGD token holders. If you recall, DigixGlobal raised over 460,000 ETH back in 2016 (worth about $5.5 million at the time) in order to put “gold on the blockchain” […]