Tampa bitcoin company gets $5.6M loan to buy Texas mining facility

LM Funding, a bitcoin-mining company based in Tampa, announced a letter of intent to purchase a mining facility in Texas after securing a $5.6 million loan last week. 

A bitcoin-mining facility is a huge data center that makes quintillions of guesses every second to add to the next block of data to the bitcoin blockchain. One bitcoin reward of 6.25 coins is awarded every 10 minutes to some miners.

LM Funding officials say their computers, according to a story on the company in March, have computational power of 614 "petahash," or 614 quadrillion guesses a second. That's a lot, but LM Funding needs more, so it pools its guesses, or "hashes," with other miners, and the company can split the reward.

LM Funding Chair and CEO Bruce Rodgers says in a release that the Texas mining site "is currently generating 55 petahash of mining capacity using immersion mining techniques. Our primary goal with this acquisition is to invest capital to mine the full potential 72 megawatts.”

“We believe that this acquisition, if completed, will provide us with a cost-effective location to energize all our existing machines," Rodgers adds. 

In March, the Business Observer reported that LM Funding is primarily a bitcoin-mining company with eight employees and 6,000 bitcoin-specific computers placed in Kentucky and Texas. 

According to the most recent statement released by the company, on the $5.6 million loan, it currently holds 132.5 bitcoins, which are currently trading for $60,199 per coin. That's up from 127 bitcoins at the end of January, when bitcoin was trading for about $42,000 per coin. 

At the time of the reporting, the company’s stock had split and was worth $0.57 a share and was working within the 180-day grace period to achieve the $1 share value minimum required by NASDAQ. As of today, the company has a share value of $3.39.

LM Funding America was founded in 2008 and went public in 2015. The company offers funding to nonprofit community associations in multiple states by helping pay portions of delinquent accounts.  LM Funding expanded into cryptocurrency mining operations in September 2022.