Bitcoin
First Mover Americas: BTC retreats from $60K
Bitcoin traded around $57,000 during the European morningafter a pullback from the $60,000 resistance level on ThursdayBitcoin has seen a 2.4% decline over the past 24 hours. The CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20) is down 2.3%. Bitcoin surged above $59,000 on Thursday after the U.S. reported its first decline in consumer prices in four years, a positive sign for the prospect of an interest rate cut by the Fed. Bitcoin’s failure to maintain a sustained rally despite the positive macro news suggests more price weakness lies ahead.
The Iris Energy site in Childress, Texas is well suited to the company’s focus on bitcoin mining, even though analysts have determined it is not suited to AIBernstein said in a report. IREN shares fell nearly 14% on Thursday after a short-selling report from Culper Research pointed to the site’s flaws as a potential hub for AI and high-performance computing (HPC) purposes. “Iris Energy has not stated that it intends to upgrade its Childress bitcoin mining site for AI,” Bernstein analysts led by Gautam Chhugani wrote. The brokerage estimates that 65% of the company’s value is derived from bitcoin mining and the remaining 35% from AI/HPC. Iris Energy’s current $1 million/megawatt capital expenditure metric is a reflection of bitcoin mining capex, the brokerage said. Comparing it to AI/HPC capex is not meaningful.
Partior, a blockchain payments joint venture of Banking giants JPMorgan, DBS and Standard Chartered raise $60 million in Series B funding. The investment was led by Peak XV Partners with contributions from Valor Capital Group and Jump Trading Group. Partior aims to establish a unified blockchain-based interbank payment rail for instant clearing and settlement. Using blockchain-based technology to streamline such banking processes is now quite common. JPMorgan’s Onyx network has settled hundreds of billions of dollars in transactions since it went live a few years ago. Last month, Fidelity used Onyx to tokenize shares in a money market fund.