- Marathon Digital Holdings announced that the company will be launching the first Bitcoin mining pool based in North America that is fully compliant with U.S. regulations, including anti-money laundering (AML) and the Office of Foreign Asset Control’s (OFAC’s) standards.
Marathon Digital Holdings (NASDAQ:MARA) – one of the largest enterprise Bitcoin self-mining companies in North America – announced today that the company will be launching the first Bitcoin mining pool based in North America that is fully compliant with U.S. regulations, including anti-money laundering (AML) and the Office of Foreign Asset Control’s (OFAC’s) standards.
To launch the pool, Marathon has exclusively licensed technology from DMG Blockchain that allows the company to filter transactions. And Marathon intends to utilize this technology to ensure that its mining pool adheres to AML regulations and that all transactions are compliant with OFAC’s standards. The pool will refrain from processing transactions from those listed on the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (SDN). And by excluding these transactions, all bitcoin Marathon mines will be compliant with U.S. regulatory standards.
On May 1, 2021, Marathon is going to begin directing 100% of its hashrate to the new mining pool. And Marathon expects all 103,120 of its miners to be deployed by the first quarter of 2022, at which point, the company will be directing 10.37 EH/s to the mining pool. On June 1, 2021, the pool will begin accepting other U.S.-based Bitcoin mining companies.
KEY QUOTES:
“The geopolitical value of moving mining pools to North America cannot be understated. Bitcoin is now no different than any other strategic or rare earth commodity. In fact, given the number of businesses now leveraging the potential and promise of Bitcoin both for distributed ledger benefits and as a reserve and hedge against inflation points to Bitcoin being with few peers in how important it is for long-term U.S. interest. With the work of the Future of Digital Currency Initiative at Stanford, the team here believes this infrastructure will help further decentralize Bitcoin and secure the fidelity of the network in both the short and long-term.”
— Atticus Francken – Co-Founder and Senior Fellow, Future of Digital Currency Initiative at Stanford University
“While institutional interest in Bitcoin is accelerating, many large funds and corporations have expressed concerns over purchasing Bitcoin that may have been tainted by nefarious actors. Our pools’ initiatives are grounded on decentralization, transparency, legal compliance with U.S. rules and regulations, and independent auditability under U.S. auditing standards. While we appreciate some miners’ appetite for processing transactions indiscriminately, it is our belief that as a publicly listed company based in the United States, and as one focused on enabling more institutional adoption of Bitcoin, it is our responsibility to follow U.S. regulations. We believe that such regulatory compliant mining will allow us to produce ‘clean’ Bitcoin, which will enable a greater number of institutions to gain exposure to this new asset class, ultimately benefiting our organization, our shareholders, and the broader network.”
“Currently, more than two thirds of Bitcoin’s global hashrate is concentrated in pools with little transparency and most reside in one country. It is our belief that this concentration of hashrate outside the United States, where central authorities could interfere with mining operations without due process, poses a risk to the network. We believe shifting more mining power to the U.S. could reduce these risks, potentially strengthening the network and benefitting all who participate in it. If all 10.37 EH/s of our potential hashrate were pointed towards this pool today, our mining pool would be the seventh largest bitcoin mining pool in the world, putting North America on the map as a digital-asset mining hub.”
— Merrick Okamoto, Marathon’s chairman and CEO
“Merrick Okamoto’s vision for this mining pool is exactly what is needed in the crypto mining industry today. We are excited to provide Marathon with our proprietary software tools and ongoing technological support to help realize this vision.”
— Dan Reitzik, DMG Blockchain’s CEO
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