Joburg crypto mine among the most profitable in the world

One of the world’s most profitable cryptocurrency mines is located in Johannesburg, and it uses solar energy generation to power its operations, according to a MoneyWeb report.

The mine is owned by the blockchain company Libertas, which focuses on mining a currency known as Transaction Service Fee (TSF).

South Africa doesn’t feature on the list of most favourable countries for crypto mining thanks to load-shedding and substantial increases in the price of electricity — so Libertas makes use of renewable energy to power its Johannesburg-based mine.

It uses solar panels that generate roughly 3.34 kilowatts of electricity, which powers the crypto mine and office appliances.

Excess energy generated is stored in batteries to power the mine through the night. Eskom’s grid reportedly provides electricity for two to four hours a day.

“It might be strange to some people that we are doing crypto mining from an office park in Rivonia, and doing it profitably, but you need solar panels to do this effectively,” MoneyWeb quoted Libertas COO, Dragan Vidakovic, as saying.

Libertas’ Johannesburg-based crypto mine produces one gigahash (or a billion attempts at solutions) per second. A second mine based in Bosnia-Herzegovina produces 15 gigahashes per second.

The Bosnia-Herzegovina mine produces approximately 450 coins an hour, compared to the Johannesburg-based mine’s 30 coins per hour.

Both mines generate TSF tokens which are used to fund payments and transactions on the TSF blockchain.

According to Libertas, demand for these tokens is constant as clients need to buy TSF coins to transact on the blockchain.

This demand comes from businesses such as insurance companies and financial consultants looking to remove human representatives from their operations and execute smart contracts based entirely on computer code.

While there are many TSF miners worldwide, Libertas is responsible for most of the hashpower on the blockchain.

According to Libertas CTO Asif Aziz, the Johannesburg-based mine has room to expand.

“Here in Joburg we have about 12 kilowatts available from the solar panels, and we are only using around half of that, so we have capacity to expand the mining operation — which we will do as demand for the coins increases,” MoneyWeb quoted Aziz as saying.

Over the past year, the token’s value has surged 54-fold from trading for fractions of a cent to around $0.19 (R3). TSF is trading lower over the past two weeks and is down substantially from its all-time high of around $0.55 (R8.85) in October.

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