Texas Crowdfunding Platform To Offer Fractional Ownership In BTC Miners

The Texas crowdfunding platform EnergyFunders will offer fractional ownership in BTC miners and said the returns could top 100% if the price stays in the $45,000 range so let’s read more today in our latest Bitcoin news.

The Texas Crowdfunding platform EnergyFunders started selling equity shares of BTC mining operations via the BTC Discovery Fund. According to the SEC filing, the company will sell equity in BTC mining operations attached to off-grid natural gas mining rigs for $5,000 per share and the company said the filing will sell up to $10 million worth of shares. This means that the investors can fund the BTC mining for a minimum of $5000 investment and receive monthly payouts so if BTC Stays in the $45,000 price range, EnergyFunders estimated that investors will see returns above $100 with the mined BTC will be distributed among the investors every month.

The first BTC miner, a 1-megawatt rig got turned in Bee County, Texas, EnergyFunders CEO Laura Pommer said, and pitched to the team as a way to monetize the stranded wells that are not hooked up to the electrical grid:

“Of course, they’re like, ‘Hell yeah.’ So we started down that path and quickly discovered that mining Bitcoin is actually fairly complicated. Which is fine, you know. Oil and gas people never shy away from complicated operations. It’s sort of our bread and butter, actually.”

EnergyFunders launched in 2015 as a crowdfunding platform and matches accredited investors with independent oil and gas producers while in 2018, the company became a FINRA-approved crowdfunding platform and started allowing investors to take part in funding opportunities. Being a regulated crowdfunding platform is an important detail because the fractionalized BTC mining operations could otherwise run afoul of the Howey Test.

The SEC commissioner Hester Pierce also thinks that the Howey Test risks being too strict in how it gets applied to crypto projects, saying it is making it impossible to get started with a project without falling into the Howey definition, adding that the test was been quite a useful framework for the regulators to think about whether an investment contract and is a security. EnergyFunders was able to register the BTC Discovery Fund under a Rule 506 (c) exemption which is meant for crowdfunding. This is the same reason Republic was able to offer what it calls “Security NFTs” which entitled buyers to a chunk of the artist’s song royalties so in that case, the music artists funded their careers by sharing the profits with NFT owners.