Mining • July 21, 2021, 10:15AM EDT
UPDATED: July 21, 2021, 10:25AM EDT

Bitcoin mining firm Core Scientific to list on Nasdaq via merger deal

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U.S. bitcoin mining and colocation provider Core Scientific has said it's going public via a merger deal.

The firm said in an announcement on Wednesday that it has entered a definitive merger agreement that will see it acquired by Nasdaq-listed Power & Digital Infrastructure Acquisition Corp (XPDI), whose anchor investor is the asset manager BlackRock.

After the transaction, the two will operate as Core Scientific and remain public on the Nasdaq stock exchange with a boosted valuation of about $4.3 billion.

In addition, Core Scientific said it also has a pending acquisition of Blockcap, another bitcoin mining firm founded by Core Scentific's co-founder Darin Feinstein.

Core Scientific said it mined 928 bitcoin in Q2 and 1,683 BTC in the first half of this year. It foresees the revenue for this year to be nearly $500 million with an adjusted EBITDA of $203 million.

With facilities in four states in the U.S., Core Scientific operates proprietary mining facilities as well as hosts bitcoin mining equipment for customers. It could be seen as the biggest rival to publicly listed U.S. bitcoin miner Marathon in terms of its ambitions to grow its hash rate.

Core Scientific said in April that it bought another 112,800 units of Bitmain's newest generation of the AntMiner S19 series machines.

With that purchase, Core Scientific’s total equipment on-order would amount to 188,824 units expected to be delivered throughout this year and next year. More than half of the equipment is for Core Scientific’s proprietary mining operations and the remaining was purchased on behalf of its hosting clients, the firm said at the time. 

At full deployment, the hash rate on its sites will have about 18 exahashes per second of computing power. At bitcoin's current mining difficulty, that amount of computing power can generate about 167 bitcoin every day.

Core Scientific said that, in line with its hash rate expansion, it is also growing its mining facilities that will boast a capacity of 510 megawatts by the end of this year.