Blockchain Startup Blockstream Launches Institutional Bitcoin Mining Service

Blockchain infrastructure company Blockstream has announced the launch of its bitcoin mining services.

In blog post, Blockstream unveiled Blockstream Mining, which will provide mining equipment colocation in the company’s purpose-built data centers in Quebec and Georgia designed to meet the needs of institutional and enterprise customers.

“We were one of the first Bitcoin mining companies to enter the Quebec hydropower market, long before the recent “gold rush” began, and together with our facility in Georgia, USA, we now have over 300MW of energy capacity secured (with more sites on the way),” Blockstream said. “We also have a self-mining operation, which represents less than 1% of global hash rate, running on a combination of hardware from Bitfury, Ebang, MicroBT, and other manufacturers.”

The mining facility counts Fidelity Center for Applied Technology and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman among its initial clients. According to Blockstream, they will open their facilities to smaller scale miners in the future.

In addition to the mining facility, Blockstream also revealed a mining pool, called Blockstream Pool, which is based on the BetterHash protocol – an improved mining pool protocol that gives individual miners the ability to control which Bitcoin transactions to include in their newly mined blocks.

“The Blockstream Pool has been running on Testnet for over a year and is initially available to Blockstream Mining customers,” Blockstream said. “We will expand to a wider audience over time as we continue to work towards further decentralization. We look forward to open collaboration on pool protocol standards.”