Bitcoin miner Argo repays $35M Galaxy bailout loan

Bitcoin miner Argo Blockchain finished repaying $35 million it borrowed from asset manager Galaxy Digital in 2022 to stave off bankruptcy amid that year’s crypto bear market, according to an Aug. 12 company filing. 

The repayment marks “a significant milestone for Argo” and was accomplished “without any meaningful impact to Argo’s hashrate,” Argo CEO Thomas Chippas said in a statement. Hashrate measures the computational power of a cryptocurrency mining operation and directly relates to how much Bitcoin (BTC) a miner can earn in a given period.

In December 2022, Argo narrowly avoided bankruptcy by agreeing to a multi-part deal with Galaxy that included selling its Helios Bitcoin mining facility in Dickens County, Texas, for $65 million and refinancing its debt with a $35 million loan.

The loan was collateralized by Argo’s “23,619 Bitmain S19J Pro mining machines currently operating at Helios and certain machines located at Argo’s Canadian data centers,” Argo said. As part of the deal, Argo agreed to lease back space in Helios to keep running its Bitcoin mining equipment.

Since then, Argo has continued building out its mining capabilities, including deploying approximately 2,750 BlockMiner machines from ePIC Blockchain Technologies in the third quarter of 2023, according to its 2023 annual report.

Argo had a hashrate of 2.7 exahashes per second (EH/s) as of the end of 2023. The total hashrate for the Bitcoin network is currently 677.43 EH/s, according to data from CoinWarz. In July, Argo mined 48 BTC, or 1.5 BTC per day on average, the company announced.

On Aug. 1, Galaxy unveiled “plans to expand and monetize the high-voltage power capacity at its flagship Helios data center in Dickens County, Texas,” according to a report by Benchmark analyst Mark Palmer.

Palmer said Helios stands to benefit from “the anticipated demand from artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC) projects for enormous amounts of power.”