A bankruptcy petition was filed by Core Scientific in the Southern District of Texas. The miner has between $1 billion to $10 billion in liabilities, and has about 1,000-5,000 creditors, with investment bank B Riley holding the largest unsecured claim.
Core Scientific accounts for about 10% of the computing power on the bitcoin network, so its bankruptcy has shocked the industry in a sector that is already in disarray. 243,000 mining machines are run by the company.
In November, Core Scientific reiterated that it may run out of money by the end of this year after saying it would not be paying some of its loan installments. The company has been in talks to restructure its debt and raise capital, but the talks seem to have failed.
As of October 31, Core Scientific had 243,000 machines in its facilities, split between self-mining and hosted machines. The company was also affected by the bankruptcies of Celsius Mining and BlockFi.
In the past few months, Bitcoin miners have been under severe pressure as cryptocurrency prices have crashed and energy prices have soared. Other major cryptocurrency lenders, such as Celsius Network and Voyager Digital Ltd., have also gone bankrupt as a result of extreme market conditions.
