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.”

Newsletter

Subscribe to The Breakdown

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.
0xResearch: Alpha in your inbox. Think like an analyst.

Tags

Newsletter

The Breakdown

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

Upcoming Events

Digital Asset Summit 2026

Javits Center North | 445 11th Ave

Tues - Thurs, March 24 - 26, 2026

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

The Privacy Primitive: FHE Comes to Mainnet

Fully homomorphic encryption is emerging as the leading cryptographic approach to onchain confidentiality, enabling computation directly on encrypted data without exposure. We are constructive on FHE as a category and Zama as the clear leader, though the 1,000x+ computational overhead and hardware dependency represent material execution risks that make throughput scaling the key variable for valuation.

by Daniel Shapiro