By Samuel Indyk
Investing.com – Shares in Quantum Blockchain Technologies (LON:QBTQ) were trading higher by over 17% in early trade on Wednesday after the company announced a partnership aimed at optimising the Bitcoin mining process.
The AIM-listed company said it had entered into a one-year service agreement with a UK-based international cryptography expert whose specialism is cryptocurrency mining blockchain optimisations.
Implementation of the first set of existing optimisations is expected to be ready for testing in the coming weeks and Quantum believes this could eventually result in faster execution and energy saving.
The aim is to improve the efficiency of Bitcoin mining, targeting a material reduction in energy usage and faster hash processing, therefore increasing profitability.
Financial Details
As part of the agreement, the unnamed cryptography expert has been awarded share options over 10,000,000 new ordinary shares of 0.25 pence each at an exercise price of 5 pence each.
“Securing the services of an international expert, who already has significant experience and know-how in Bitcoin mining optimisations, is one of the first concrete moves by the Company to challenge the substantial Bitcoin market,” said Quantum Blockchain CEO Francesco Gardin.
“The Company is addressing, in parallel, other cutting-edge approaches to Bitcoin mining, including, among others, the use of quantum computing. More detailed announcements will be made in due course.
“We believe that this out-of-the-box approach gives us the potential to play a disruptive role in the Bitcoin mining industry.”
Energy usage
The energy used by the Bitcoin network for transactions and mining has become a major talking point in recent weeks after Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk said his electric vehicle company would stop accepting Bitcoin as payment for vehicles due to the energy consumption of the network.
Some estimates suggest that the network uses as much energy in a year as a medium sized country, such as the Netherlands or Argentina. With much of the mining carried out in China, where much of the power is provided by coal, the energy usage of Bitcoin has come under the spotlight.
“We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions,” Elon Musk said on Twitter last month.
At 09:19BST, shares in Quantum Blockchain Technologies were trading higher by 15.7% at 1.48 pence per share.