THE MINING POD: ERCOT’s 266 GW Surge, IREN’s $2.3B Raise, GPUs > ASICs, Whatsminer M70
This week in bitcoin mining news, ERCOT sees a 266 GW of interconnection requests in 2026, IREN closed a $2.3 billion convertible note offering, and GPUs are leaving ASICs in the dust.
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Welcome back to The Mining Pod! Today, Ethan Vera, COO of Luxor, joins us as we dive into MicroBT’s Whatsminer M70 launching into a challenging ASIC market, IREN’s $2.3 billion convertible note offering, the precarious state of hashprice, Luxor’s new GPU hardware sales business, the staggering 270% leap in ERCOT interconnection requests, and the controversial Cat bitcoin fork proposal aimed at filtering ordinals / inscriptions.
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**Notes:**
- Hash price is below $40 per second
- Three negative difficulty adjustments
- Ercot requests leaped 270% in 2025
- 73% of requests from data centers
- IREN raised $2.3B in convertible notes
- M70 efficiency: 12.5 J/TH
00:00 Start
02:35 Difficulty Report by Luxor
07:26 IREN note
10:44 M70 launch
20:02 Luxor launches GPU trading
27:12 ERCOT LL requests up 270% in 2025
34:10 Cry Corner: another filter fork proposal
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