Digital Gold

Ethan Vera - How Bitcoin Mining Is Evolving Into Bitcoin's Institutional Backbone [Digital Gold, Ep. 9]

Episode Summary

Ethan is Co-Founder of Luxor, North America’s largest mining pool and hashrate management platform. He is also co-founder of Hashrate Index, a data website dedicated to the mining industry. Before founding Luxor, Ethan was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. Ethan advised MNCs on cross-border Asia M&A (buy-side, sell-side, take private, private placement, and activism defense) transactions across the semiconductor, renewable energy, and internet industries. Ethan and the team at Luxor are focused on building a range of solutions for scaling blockchain infrastructure and vertically integrating mining pools and enterprise-grade management software to provide investors with a full-service investment vehicle for cryptocurrency mining. Our conversation begins by discussing how Ethan was introduced to the bitcoin space through a mining project and his decision to leave his investment banking position at Goldman to work on mining software products full-time. We then dive into some of the software products Ethan is working on with his team at Luxor and continue on by discussing the new-class of hedging products being built for bitcoin miners. Finally, we finish off the conversation by discussing how debt and ASIC financing has been introduced to the industry in 2020 and how the industry is poised to mature throughout this current Bitcoin cycle. This was one of my favorite episodes of Digital Gold so far. Ethan and I really get into the nitty-gritty of the bitcoin mining industry and I'm confident you'll enjoy the talk.