Cryptocurrency company Argo Blockchain (ARB) saw its stock plunge nearly 10% on Friday as stock markets were rattled by a steep sell-off in global bonds.
Fixed-income assets have come under pressure as investors bet that rising inflation will force central banks to start raising interest rates. The complex relationship to equity markets saw the mood darken for higher risk stocks.
Argo Blockchain, which verifies blockchain distributed ledger transactions, saw its share price fall 22p to 240p. That still values the business at around £900 million after retail investors piled into the stock in their thousands this year.
INCREDIBLE STOCK SURGE
The stock has surged more than 600% in 2021 as Bitcoin prices soared to record levels of $57,489.10. Argo Blockchain earns Bitcoin for its transaction verification work, according to its website, a hugely power-hungry business needing vast data processing capacity because of the complex calculations required.
Coincidentally, the company said it installed 4,500 processing machines that it leased from Celsius Network in November 2020. The new mining hardware has added ‘approximately 430 petahash to the company's installed computing power and consumes approximately 15 megawatts of electricity’, the company said.
A hash is a part of a calculation needed to verify a Bitcoin transaction, so a petahash is 1,000,000,000,000,000 hashes.
