Today, Canadian clean technology company MintGreen announced the close of a seed financing round as it prepares to deploy a large-scale commercial project to harvest heat from bitcoin mining, according to a press release shared with Bitcoin Magazine. The round was led by CoinShares Ventures, the investment arm of major digital asset firm CoinShares.
MintGreen’s focus is on shifting one of the main criticisms of Bitcoin — that the mining process consumes a lot of energy — into a positive, by recapturing this energy to heat and cool future cities.
“Bitcoin fixes many things, but we find ourselves with the unique opportunity to fix one of Bitcoin’s biggest problems without changing a line of code,” said Sullivan in the release.
MintGreen is pioneering the reuse of heat generated by computers while mining bitcoin to sell to industrial clients. It utilizes “immersion” systems to mine bitcoin with clean-sourced energy, then produce heat from that process. The release indicated that it is partnering with district energy operations to deliver hot water to entire city blocks’ worth of buildings.
The Vancouver-based startup is also running two pilot projects. One involves selling bitcoin mining heat waste to a sea salt company, which uses it to literally boil the ocean (water from the Pacific Ocean, to be exact) so it can distill salt flakes in the process. The other sells bitcoin mining heat to a Canadian whiskey company so that it can boil mash as part of its process.
“Colin and the MintGreen team are doing some really innovative work around heat recovery and redistribution,” Samson Mow, CSO of Blockstream and a special advisor to MintGreen, told Bitcoin Magazine. “It’s great to see them expanding their operations and opening up new opportunities for the mining industry to grow.”
As the bitcoin price continues to hit new all-time highs and miners revenues are higher than ever, pressure is building on bitcoin mining companies to use more sustainable energy sources as the number of miners increase to meet an increasing international demand for bitcoin.
The announcement also indicated a growing interest in funding green mining solutions from CoinShares.
“At CoinShares, we believe Bitcoin will drive fundamental changes in the energy and infrastructure sectors,” Meltem Demirors, CSO of CoinShares, said, per the release. “As the North American bitcoin mining ecosystem grows, innovative companies like MintGreen will bridge the gap between bitcoin mining, industrial power generation and sustainability mandates.”