Unpublished Paper
Bitcoin Mining Meets Wall Street: A Study of Publicly Traded Crypto Mining Companies
(2023)
Abstract
This paper studies the operations and financial valuations of 13 cryptocurrency mining companies that are listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange and have facilities in North America. We find that miners using Texas wind power are offline more than other miners, in a more erratic pattern, while receiving significant revenue augmentations from “curtailment” payments by electric utilities. Despite having relatively low activity levels, these Texas miners are more profitable than those using more stable sources of energy such as hyrdo power or solar power, as reflected in significantly higher enterprise values. We find a negative and significant beta between crypto mining stocks and an index of electric utilities, suggesting that ownership of a crypto mining company might provide a useful channel for risk management in the electric power industry.
Keywords
- cryptocurrency,
- bitcoin,
- mining,
- load balancing,
- renewable energy
Disciplines
Publication Date
2023
Citation Information
Hanna Halaburda and David Yermack. "Bitcoin Mining Meets Wall Street: A Study of Publicly Traded Crypto Mining Companies" (2023) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/halaburda/62/