Bitcoin miner CleanSpark to launch in-house trading desk: Bloomberg

CleanSpark CEO Zachary Bradford said that the move “makes financial sense”

January 2, 2024 04:37 pm

rafapress/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks

Bitcoin mining company CleanSpark plans to launch an in-house trading desk, according to Bloomberg.

CleanSpark CEO Zachary Bradford told the media outlet that the decision was made due to the large bitcoin balance held by the company. A November mining update shows that the company held 2,575 bitcoin.

CleanSpark didn’t immediately return a Blockworks request for comment on the move.

“It just makes financial sense to do it in-house,” Bradford said. He added that more miners may launch trading desks in-house “that way, you can manage it with your own risk profiles and expertise and keep a really close eye on it.”

The Nevada-based miner is a publicly traded company, trading on Nasdaq under the ticker CLSK. Over the past year, the stock is up 428%.

The move follows similar actions from other miners such as Marathon Digital which sold Bitcoin call options contracts, according to Bloomberg.

But trading desks aren’t the only way for miners to broaden their revenue streams. Some have also pivoted to offer high-performance computing.

The companies, as Blockworks previously reported, are putting money to work with big machine buys ahead of the bitcoin halving and a potential spot bitcoin ETF approval — or approvals.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission is expected to give potential spot bitcoin ETF issuers an answer by Jan. 10 — which is also the agency’s due date to give Ark/21Shares an answer on its proposal.

In recent weeks, there’s been a flurry of meetings and filed amendments as issuers race to fill out the nitty gritty details — such as disclosing authorized participants and fees — necessary prior to any potential launches.

Bitcoin (BTC) is currently trading around $44,000 after hitting a high not seen in nearly two years on the first day of the year.

Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

The Breakdown: Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily.
Empire: Crypto news and analysis to start your day.
Forward Guidance: The intersection of crypto, macro and policy.
0xResearch: Alpha directly in your inbox.
Lightspeed: All things Solana.
The Drop: Apps, games, memes and more.
Supply Shock: Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin.

Tags

Newsletter

The Breakdown

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

Digital Asset Summit 2025

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

buy tickets learn more

recent research

Research

Building the Global Trading Engine

Innovations on Aptos’ technical design through Raptr, Shardines, and Zaptos approach near-optimal latency and throughput by unlocking 100% utilization of network resources, with the capacity to settle 260k transactions per second with latencies less than 800ms. The original Move language was revamped with the launch of Move 2, supporting more expressivity in smart contract logic and a scalable ability to interact with high volume datasets. The ecosystem has benefitted from strong asset inflows, now hosting over $1.3B in stablecoins, $450M in bridged BTC, and $530M in RWAs. Activity in the Aptos ecosystem has grown notably over the past year, with monthly application revenue reaching ~$835k and monthly DEX volumes growing to over $5B, both at new all time highs.

by Luke Leasure