Ten31 Timestamp 772,245
The Ten31 team spent the week at the first annual Nashville Energy & Mining Summit at Bitcoin Park, where Grant Gilliam, Jonathan Kirkwood, Matt Odell, Marty Bent, and Parker Lewis led or participated in several panels. Even amid the depths of a bear market and with hashprice near its all-time low, the energy at the event was highly enthusiastic and bullish as dozens of the space’s top operators came together to discuss lessons learned from the mining headwinds of 2022 and exciting greenfield opportunities for the industry moving forward. The event was the latest confirmation of our view that the richness of bitcoin mining’s design space is underappreciated even by many bitcoiners, with much innovation still to come across hardware, software, financing mechanisms, and integration with the energy industry. We expect mining to play an increasingly crucial role across many sectors of the economy and are excited to have partnered with several of the companies at the forefront of that development.
Fund II New Investments
Coinkite develops and manufactures consumer tools for interacting with bitcoin, including Coldcard – a highly secure hardware signing device that sets the standard for private key custody – physical bearer instruments (Opendime and Satscard), an NFC-enabled card for signing transactions (Tapsigner), and more. The company’s product portfolio balances security with usability and includes some of the most popular consumer products available to bitcoiners. “We expect NFC could play a significant role in onboarding the next billion users to Bitcoin.” -NVK
Selected Portfolio News
Start9 continued its recent accelerated cadence of new service rollouts by launching a package for NextCloud, a popular self-hosted platform for online collaboration:
Cathedra Bitcoin provided its latest operational update, noting the company has achieved significant efficiency gains at two of its sites via underclocking:
Unchained is now offering sats-back gift cards through The Bitcoin Company:
Media
Matt Odell joined What Bitcoin Did for a wide-ranging discussion to recap 2022 and examine lessons learned from last year’s many custodial implosions.
Max Keidun, founder of Hodl Hodl and Debifi, published an essay in Bitcoin Magazine discussing the market potential for non-rehypothecated bitcoin-backed lending.
Start9’s recently released package for Joinmarket implementation JAM was featured in a tutorial on popular education channel BTC Sessions.
River Financial founder and CEO Alex Leishman discussed River’s vision and development on the Bitcoin Matrix podcast.
Market Updates
Bitcoin’s price broke above the $20,000 level for the first time since the implosion of FTX and many of its counterparties in early November 2022.
Meanwhile, network hashrate returned to all-time high levels of roughly 270 EH/s.
December’s US CPI reading came in at 6.5% Y/Y, down from 7.1% in November and several points below the June peak of 9.1%. Core CPI was up 5.7% Y/Y, though the services component of the core index remains at multi-year highs and has yet to show signs of rolling over.
The credibility of Japan’s yield curve control policy continued to deteriorate, as the BOJ’s yield cap target of 50bps for the 10-year JGB – raised from 25bps only last month – failed to hold, leading to another round of emergency bond buying.
The BOJ has now bought 13 trillion yen ($101 billion usd) in government bonds through the first two weeks of January, already a record volume for a single month.
Both Coinbase and Crypto.com announced new rounds of layoffs, with each company set to cut around 20% of staff.
Samsung Asset Management announced the launch of a new futures-based bitcoin ETF in Hong Kong.
Regulatory Update
Gemini co-founder Cameron Winklevoss returned to Twitter with a second open letter to Genesis and its parent company DCG, this time accusing both of fraud and calling for DCG CEO Barry Silbert to step down.
Shortly thereafter, the SEC formally charged both Genesis and Gemini with selling unregistered securities in connection with Gemini’s Earn program.
El Salvador’s legislature passed a new bill that will lay out the framework for the country’s issuance of bitcoin bonds, originally announced in November 2021. The bill also formally establishes that all non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies will be treated as securities in El Salvador.
Noteworthy
Luxor’s Hashrate Index team released their 2022 year in review for bitcoin mining.
Publicly traded bitcoin miner Hive Blockchain announced it has deployed its first 1,500 machines using Intel’s new Blockscale ASIC.
A recent report from the MIT Technology Review detailed how the Democratic Republic of the Congo is using bitcoin mining to monetize stranded resources within Virunga National Park to help sustain the protected land amid declining tourism revenue.
Bitcoin developer James O’Beirne released a proposal for a new vault structure called OP_VAULT. The design attempts to marry some of the potential benefits of vaults with greater flexibility for end users, and will require a soft fork to enable the needed covenants.
Travel
Austin BitDevs, January 19
Austin Ten31 Tribe event, March 16
Nashville Ten31 Tribe event, June 14