Crypto-miners Bitfury partner up with Lian Group to upgrade $35 million data centre

We advised our client, Lian Group, as regards a new partnership with San-Francisco-based crypto-mining firm and telecoms provider, Bitfury.

(If you are wondering what crypto-mining is then click HERE to read a detailed layman’s guide from HLaw.)

The partnership will allow Bitfury to upgrade its existing blockchain infrastructure which includes a large data centre in Norway.

Lian Group has – on the back of the partnership with Bitfury – made a crypto-mining service available to its private equity clients.

The Norwegian data centre is the first of its kind. It is located near Norway’s second-largest glacier, the Svartisen. The low-cost electricity grid and new crypto-mining hardware will provide an edge to the computational capacity within the data centre and allow crypto-mining to take place profitably.

Lian Group invested in Bitfury in 2018 as part of an $80 million private placement funding round. The round at the time was led by Korelya Capital, the European arm of South Korea’s Naver Group. Macquarie Capital, Dentsu, Armat Group, Jabre, Argenthal Capital Partners, MACSF, Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital, and itech Capital also participated.

Nessim-Sariel Gaon, Partner at Lian Group, commented:

“We were impressed with the speed at which HLaw brought themselves up to speed and the efficiency with which they helped us transact. It’s good to be working with lawyers that understand the blockchain space.”