Friday, March 11. As the week comes to an end, we can focus on the highlights of the crypto industry over the past few days.
Mobile processor-based video cards for Ethereum mining pop up in China
Custom graphics cards have come into existence on China’s popular second-hand selling platform Goofish. They open up a possibility to tiptoe around Nvidia’s limiter for mining by the aid of the mobile processor.
The device is based on the GA106 graphics processor from the GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile, used in laptops. It has not been subjected to Lite Hash Rate (LHR) blocking, has 30 stream multiprocessors and shows high performance at around 50 MH/s when mining Ethereum.
In one ad, there is a farm put up for sale which is based on nine of these models, which together produce over 240 MH/s with a power consumption of 910 watts.
Experts point out the potential use of GPUs by gamers – they are equipped with an HDMI output, and the GA106 mobile chip has more CUDA cores than the desktop version. Nevertheless, their gaming performance is not high due to twice as little VRAM (6 GB GDDR6) and low TDP.
Bain Capital Ventures establishes a $560 million crypto fund
BCV announced the launch of a new all cryptocurrency-driven fund. $560 million was raised to manage the structure.
These funds for Bain Capital Crypto were raised back in the fall of 2021. The crypto fund has already invested in a number of projects, including Compound Finance, MakerDAO and dYdX. In the course of a conversation with Bloomberg, Stefan Cohen, the crypto fund manager, specified that $100 million was spent for this purpose.
The company noted that the fund is geared towards the long-term outlook, so it does not take into account the short-term price volatility. This structure will invest in shares of industry companies and in digital tokens. Furthermore, they plan to buy the latter from the DAO or secondary markets.
Binance to invest in companies for involving them into the crypto industry
Changpeng Zhao, the Binance CEO, spoke in an interview with the Financial Times about the exchange’s plans to invest in non-cryptocurrency-related companies in order to more broadly introduce digital assets into the traditional financial system.
Reuters also reported that Zhao discussed the purchase of Roman Abramovich’s previously put up for sale English soccer club Chelsea.
Changpeng Zhao screened out the idea because it was of low priority. Zhao himself had no comment on this information.
You may recall that in February Binance announced a strategic investment of $200 million in the Forbes media holding. The funds will support the latter’s plans to enter the stock market.
Goldman Sachs to extend crypto derivatives offerings
GS investment bank is contemplating offering over-the-counter bilateral crypto options. This is reported by Bloomberg news agency.
According to the publication’s sources, the company is among the few Wall Street banks in the early stages of exploring such products.
Bilateral options allow trades to be set up so that crypto holders, such as funds or bitcoin miners, can hedge risk or enhance returns.
The market is still embryonic for such derivatives, and is dominated by cryptocompanies like Genesis Global Trading Galaxy Digital Holdings and GSR. Of the traditional market players, there is a noticable presence of the trading giant DRW Holdings, which is a liquidity provider.