Argo Sells Bitcoin Mining Site for $6.1M to Repay Galaxy Debt
Bitcoin mining firm Argo Blockchain (NASDAQ: ARBK) has sold yet another site to reduce its outstanding debt owed to asset management and mining lending firm Galaxy Digital.
Argo said on Tuesday that it had sold the Mirabel facility in Quebec for $6.1 million, which has a power capacity of five megawatts (MW). The company will relocate miners in the Mirabel site to its Baie Comeau site in Quebec while liquidating older miners representing 140 PH/s.
Argo has used $4 million of the proceeds to repay the Galaxy Digital debt, after which its outstanding balance has been reduced to $14 million as of the end of February. However, Argo still had $40 million of senior notes outstanding with an interest rate of 8.75%.
Argo was among a list of publicly traded mining companies that took notable financial leverage during the 2021 bull run to expand bitcoin mining infrastructure and equipment without selling bitcoin reserves.
Amid the market downfall, Argo sold its flagship Helios mining site in Texas to Galaxy Digital in December 2022 for $65 million and borrowed additional funds of $35 million from Galaxy so that it had enough proceeds to pay off the debts owed to NYDIG.
Following the Helios transaction, Argo became a hosting client at Galaxy Digital’s Helios site while operating part of its fleet in the other two sites in Canada until the Mirabel sale.
Argo mined 92 BTC in February with a realized hashrate of 1.87 EH/s, which accounted for 69% of its installed hashate of 2.7 EH/s. It said the downtime was “primarily due to a maintenance-related outage at the Cottonwood substation which is owned and operated by an unaffiliated third party.”
According to the announcement, Argo’s total downtime from the outage was 77 hours, representing 11% of the month, and operations resumed after the maintenance was completed on Feb. 21.
