Crypto exchange Binance announced a $500 million project to support Bitcoin mining and infrastructure providers.
The Binance Pool will provide debt financing services to public and private blue-chip Bitcoin mining and digital asset infrastructure companies globally, the company says.
Bitcoin miners are struggling as the price of Bitcoin tumbled over the year. Meanwhile, the mining difficulty rate reaches all-time highs and energy prices increase in America and the EU.
The difficulty to mine bitcoin hit an all-time high on Monday, jumping 13.5% to surpass the 35.61 trillion mark, BTC.com data shows. The average hash rate, or amount of computing power required to verify blockchain transactions, rose to 257 exahashes per second (EH/s).
Eligible borrowers will have access to 18- to 24-month term loans with interest rates ranging from 5% to 10%. They will have to offer collateral in the form of physical or digital assets, that are "satisfactory" to Binance
The Binance Pool also intends to launch cloud-mining products and is seeking vendors to work with. Binance says the cloud-mining hash power will be directly purchased from Bitcoin mining and digital infrastructure providers.
The stock prices for publicly-traded miners like Marathon Digital, HIVE Blockchain, Hut 8 Mining, CleanSpark all collapsed between 65% and 80% so far this year.
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