Bitcoin Surges Above $62k, Ark Invest & 21Shares Integrate Chainlink Proof of Reserves

• Bitcoin ($BTC) continues its stellar week, rising 9.02% to surpass the $62k mark and bring it within 11% of its all-time high. $ETH has gained 5.43% today, exceeding $3,400, a level not seen since April 2022. Meme coins are outperforming today, with $PEPE, $DOGE, and $WIF gaining 21.63%, 19.07%, and 23.25%, respectively. The strong moves across various names have squeezed shorts, with over $209 million in short liquidations in the last 24 hours. U.S. equities are not sharing in crypto’s rise as many are focused on tomorrow morning’s PCE data. The SPY and QQQ are showing modest declines, decreasing by 0.08% and 0.33%, respectively, while the DXY has gained 0.16% as it hovers around the $104 mark.
• Ark Invest and 21Shares have integrated Chainlink’s Proof of Reserve product to increase the transparency of their Bitcoin ETF holdings (ARKB). ARKB has accumulated approximately $1.6 billion in Bitcoin since launching in January, making it the fourth-largest Bitcoin ETF by AUM. Ark and 21Shares are the first Bitcoin ETF issuer to leverage Chainlink’s technology and set a new standard for digital asset security and transparency. Chainlink ($LINK) is the leading oracle provider across the industry and has secured over $9 trillion in on-chain value across over 11.8 billion data points. Its Proof of Reserves product will give investors further transparency into ETF reserves by pulling data directly from Coinbase via an up-to-date decentralized reference contract. Investors will be able to monitor ARKB’s holdings in real-time with full confidence in the data’s accuracy with no singular point of failure. $LINK has gained 5.92% today following the integration announcement.
• Riot Platforms (RIOT) has entered into a new purchase agreement with MicroBT to buy 31,500 next-generation M60S miners for a total consideration of $97.4 million, reflecting a rate of $16.50 per terahash (TH). All the miners will be deployed at Riot’s Rockdale Facility, with 14,500 utilizing available capacity and the remaining ones replacing underperforming machines. Replacing old miners with newer models should increase Riot’s hash rate capacity and efficiency, reducing Riot’s bitcoin cost of production. M60S miners are MicroBT’s newest air-cooled machines, which boast an efficiency rating of 18.5 J/TH and produce approximately 186 TH/S per machine. The order should bring the Rockdale Facility’s self-mining hash rate capacity to 15.1 exahashes per second (EH/S) by the end of July. The miners are expected to be shipped between May and June 2024.

Source: Riot Platforms