https://irisenergy.co/

Company Overview

The company is Iris Energy (IREN).

Iris Energy is an Australian-based bitcoin mining company that is a newcomer to the bitcoin mining world, but which has the potential to turn into an industry powerhouse by 2023.

For context, bitcoin mining companies are firms that acquire and/or build huge data centers, and apply that compute power to solving bitcoin hashing algorithms. For solving those algorithms, these mining companies are rewarded with bitcoin. In short, these companies leverage big computers to solve hard math problems in order to win bitcoin. Their revenue is the value of the bitcoin they mine. Their costs are the costs it takes to mine those bitcoin.

The bitcoin mining industry is very crowded. Iris Energy is a relative newcomer to the industry, with an operational compute power – dubbed “hash-rate” in the industry – of just 0.7 EH/s, good enough for a measly 0.4% share of the bitcoin mining market.

However, Iris Energy has three big things going for it:

First, the company’s mining operations are based on renewable energy. Its first data center in British Columbia is powered by 98% clean energy. All future projects will have similarly high clean energy power rates.

Second, Iris Energy doesn’t hold Bitcoin on the balance sheet, unlike many other miners. Iris liquidates all of its Bitcoin holdings, thereby producing instant cash flow which can be re-invested into scaling data center infrastructure, improving the hash rate, and ultimately earning more bitcoin.

Third, Iris Energy has secured contracts to bring on 15.2 EH/s of miners over the next two years. Therefore, the company’s hash rate will grow by more than 20X into 2023.

Iris Energy went public via an initial public offering in November. The IPO price was $28. The current stock price is $13 and some change. The company is valued at around $800 million, about half of its IPO valuation.