Is Armenia The New Bitcoin Hub?

ECOS Expanding the Facility’s Capacity

A digital platform dubbed ECOS Free Economic Zone brought positive news from Armenia, a nation that doesn’t often make waves on the world crypto map, towards the end of August. ECOS announced expanding the facility’s capacity by 60 megawatts (MW), which has been in operation since 2018.

The mining operation, which is located near one of the hydropower facilities on the Hrazdan River, uses the site’s infrastructure to power containers while receiving its electricity straight from the high-voltage system. Representatives of the platform mentioned that ECOS might grow to produce 200 MW more of renewable power. In contrast, the Berlin Geothermal Plant in El Salvador distributes 1.5MW of the 102MW it generates to cryptocurrency miners, but the Greenidge Generation near Seneca Lake in the State of New York should have generated roughly 44MW.

Perhaps it is high time to evaluate the industrial potential of this post-Soviet country, standing 1,850 meters above sea level, given the developments with crypto mining laws in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) region — nations of the former Soviet Union.

No Updates about the Operations

The most definite thing we know about Armenia in terms of crypto is that it doesn’t provide us with a lot of information. In 2018, the Armenian Blockchain Association filed a lawsuit against digital behemoths including Google, Twitter, and Facebook for prohibiting advertisements linked to cryptocurrencies, together with its counterparts from Switzerland, Kazakhstan, Russia, China, and South Korea. Although there have been some recent improvements to the prohibitions on crypto advertisements, it is unclear where the case will go from here.

The inauguration ceremony of a new mining farm, which billed itself as one of the biggest in the world, is said to have been attended by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and other prominent figures in the same year. According to estimates from the local media, some $50 million had been spent on building the farm, which now has 3,000 Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) mining machines with an eventual capacity of 120,000. The farm is a joint venture between Omnia Tech, a contentious multinational mining company, and Multi Group, a significant Armenian conglomerate led by businessman and politician Gagik Tsarukyan. Since the very first press releases, there have been no updates about the farm’s operations.