30 August  2024 · Block Height 859092 · Bitcoin Price $59K

Welcome back to the Blockspace Newsletter!

For today’s roundup, we highlight news that Blockspace broke with Rhodium’s bankruptcy filing, plus a smattering of items including Pavel Durov’s arrest and a technical breakthrough from Starkware

The Blockspace Newsletter is presented by Fold, the best place to buy Bitcoin.

What caught our eye this week

Rhodium files for chapter 11 bankruptcy

Bitcoin Miner Rhodium Enterprises filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Saturday. There had been rumors that the miner was facing solvency issues, which were then confirmed last weekend when the miner filed a voluntary petition for bankruptcy in the Southern District of Texas.

The bankruptcy includes 5 business affiliates under Rhodium’s corporate umbrella. According to the court document, Rhodium holds $50m to $100 million in liabilities and $100m to $500m in assets.

In an email sent to investors on Saturday, Rhodium management said that they are working to secure financing to help the company restructure its debt. Rhodium said that the restructuring will not disrupt its mining and hosting businesses.

“We are in the process of obtaining debtor-in-possession financing, which we believe will give us the capital we need to operate in, and emerge successfully from, chapter 11,” the management team wrote.

News

• Telegram Founder arrested and recently released with charges

  • Pavel Durov was arrested in France for Telegram’s complicity with illegal content and transactions. Understandably, privacy and free speech advocates have lambasted the arrest as government overreach. TON chain coincidentally experienced several hours of outage.

• Starkware shares major efficiency breakthrough in M31 multiplication

  • It’s complicated math, but basically it’s really powerful to have the ability to multiply numbers in bitcoin script, but we can’t currently to it in an efficient way. Starkware researchers discovered ways to do so, and it benefits Bitcoin regardless of a soft fork.

• NFT trading platform OpenSea receives Wells Notice from SEC

  • The SEC is once again targeting a prominent crypto company. For reference, a Wells Notice is typically issued at the conclusion of an investigation and allows rebuttal.

• UTXO Management publishes State of Bridges research

  • Analyst and VC Guillame Girard breaks down the different types of bridges to get Bitcoin onto other chains/layers.

• Ordinal Maxi Biz founder (a popular Ordinal collection) ZK Shark loves BitAxe

  • ZK published a blog Thursday laying out structural challenges to Bitcoin mining decentralization and calls upon “economically irrational” Bitcoiners to take up their BitAxe and mine baby, mine!

Chart of the week

Ever wonder why so many bitcoin miners are announcing AI/HPC strategies? Well, if you’re ever in doubt, just check out the average year-to-date (as of August 27, 2024) change in bitcoin mining stock prices for those miners who have and have not announced such business lines…

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