By
Chimamanda U. Martha
April 25th, 2024
Apart from being an investment partner, Macquarie will also help Blockstream in leveraging green energy renewable solutions at Blockstream’s Bitcoin mining facilities.
Post the Chinese crackdown on Bitcoin mining operations in May 2021, the industry has seen a major shift towards adopting green energy solutions. Blockstream, a global leader working on Bitcoin technology is now riding on this industry shift. Thus, Blockstream is working on building zero-emission Bitcoin mining facilities, the first of which will be in North America. With the recent partnership, Blockstream and Macquarie will pilot a Bitcoin mining facility. The two players will explore carbon-neutral alternatives for such facilities.
Cooperation between Blockstream and Macquarie
Macquarie Group is among Australia’s biggest investment banks. It has more than $400 billion in net assets under management (AUM). Blockstream will leverage its enterprise-grade mining facilities along with expertise in mining hardware hosting.
Macquarie will invest in this facility while leveraging its expertise in offering energy solutions. Thus, the investment giant will work on getting renewable energy solutions to power the mining process. The collaboration between the two players seeks to scale these operations at multiple sites by developing green power infrastructure. Speaking of the development, Blockstream CEO Dr. Adam Back said:
“Macquarie’s experience and scale in traditional infrastructure investment, as well as commodity and energy markets, and Blockstream’s position as a leading Bitcoin miner and provider of Bitcoin-based technology solutions offers terrific potential.“
Before Macquarie, Blockstream has collaborated with giants like Fidelity and Galaxy Digital. Last month, Blockstream secured $210 million in Series B funding taking its valuations above $3.2 billion.
Blockstream Introduces Singlesig Wallets
On Thursday, September 9, Blockstream introduced a Singlesig wallet options through the Blockstream Green platform. The platform said that the singlesig wallet option in Blockstream Green will be interoperable. The announcement notes:
The singlesig wallet option in Blockstream Green creates simple to use, easy to set up wallets that can be imported into any wallet app that follows BIP39 for recovery phrase derivation (mnemonic) and uses BIP44, BIP49, and BIP84 – yes, native Segwit bech32 – standards for address derivation.
Also, the singlesig wallet options created using Blockstream are highly portable. Besides, they bring stronger guarantees for recoverability. Users can spend their funds with their keys on any app that supports common wallet standards.
The platform also leverages the Blockstream Explorer infrastructure as part of the wallet backend. Thus, it serves as a reliable source of blockchain data-keeping log of the transactions. In the future release, users will be able to connect Blockstream Green to their own personal full node solution with an Electrum server for added privacy and self-sovereignty.