One of the world’s most profitable crypto mines is located in Joburg

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In the bowels of an office building in northern Johannesburg hides a cryptocurrency mine ranked among the most profitable in the world.

Banks of graphics cards, powered by solar panels placed on the roof above, solve complex mathematical puzzles and are rewarded in a currency known as the Transaction Service Fee or TSF. The TSF is the currency used to perform transactions on the transaction service fee blockchain, and is currently valued at around $ 0.24, or around five times more in the past nine months.

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The rise in the price of TSF has attracted crypto “miners” from all over the world eager to venture into one of the most profitable mining ventures in the world.

Crypto mining has grown into a massive global business, with its own economy made up of providers of mining “platforms”, developers, and the miners themselves.

Why Johannesburg?

Earlier this year, China banned crypto mining, and that drove miners to nicer places with relatively cheap electricity like Texas in the US and Kazakhstan.

Read: Bitcoin crackdown in China sets record adjustment to mining puzzle

South Africa, with its notorious power grid problems, is not on the list of most favored nations for crypto mining.

Which makes the TSF crypto mine all the more interesting. As crypto prices rise and fall, miners are turning their attention to the next gold rush and recalibrating their equipment to the most profitable mining companies available. And that put TSF on the global crypto map.

The crypto mine is owned by a blockchain company called Libertas, which is part of a global revolution focused on smart contracts and blockchain technologies that enable business transactions without the need for agents like lawyers and banks. For example, wills, insurance contracts and financial contracts can be written in computer code and executed without challenge or delay.

“It may be strange for some people that we are mining cryptocurrency from an office park in Rivonia, and doing it cost-effectively, but you need solar panels to do it efficiently. “said Dragan Vidakovic, director of operations at Libertas.

The solar panels generate 3.34 kilowatts of electricity, which is enough to power the crypto mine – which produces 1 gigashash (or 1 billion “hashes” or puzzles) per second – and supplies the power needs of the Libertas office. , including lights, computers, air conditioning and other appliances.

The solar installation generates enough energy to power the crypto mine and meet the electricity needs of the Libertas office. Image: Supplied

A second and much larger 15 gigahash crypto mine is located in Bosnia and Herzegovina in Europe, powered by hydropower.

Both mines generate TSF coins to fund payments and transactions on the TSF blockchain. Customers are required to purchase “tokens” or TSF coins to transact on the blockchain, which creates a constant demand for the coins.

While dozens of miners around the world have set up mining operations to profit from TSF coins, Libertas itself represents the bulk of mining activity.

The excess energy generated by solar panels is stored in batteries, which run mining platforms at night, with the Eskom grid operating between two and four hours a day, depending on the quality of sunlight during the day.

The Joburg farm produces around 30 pieces per hour, the Bosnian farm does 15 times more.

“Here in Johannesburg, we have about 12 kilowatts available from solar panels, and we’re only using about half of it, so we have the capacity to expand mining – which we will do as the demand for parts will increase, ”said Asif Aziz. , CTO at Libertas.

TSF parts

The demand for TSF coins is coming from business customers such as insurance companies looking to remove human agents from their business operations and execute smart contracts entirely based on computer code.

All kinds of business processes are transferred to the blockchain.

Take the subject of wills, for example. These rely on intermediaries such as lawyers and financial advisers to draft wills and then interpret them when the time comes to distribute the estate of the deceased. A much simpler method is to write the terms of the will in computer code in the form of a smart contract that cannot be changed or challenged afterwards.

Read: “The future is cryptography”

Demand for TSF coins is also coming from those who wish to issue NFTs or non-fungible tokens, creating a massive new economy around electronic property rights.

Listen to Simon Brown’s interview with Revix founder Sean Sanders in this MoneywebNOW podcast (or read the transcript here):

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