Welcome to the NiceHash crypto news digest. Let's see what happened these last few days.

Texas embraces greener Bitcoin mining with approval of flare gas emission bill

This week, House Bill 591 was passed by the Texas House and Senate which paves the way for Bitcoin miners to use flare gas emissions. This bill makes the sale of flare emissions for use by mobile data centers more clear and this often includes Bitcoin miners as well.

This step is considered to be a great way to bring industries together mitigating carbon emissions at the same time, reducing emissions by around 63%.

The Texas Blockchain Council, where NiceHash is a member, shared more information and worked hard to help draw more awareness to this bill.

Marathon investing in advanced crypto mining facilities in Abu Dhabi to mine Bitcoin in the desert

Two companies - Marathon Digital Holdings and Zero Two, are working to launch the Middle East’s first immersion bitcoin mining operations. A joint venture was formed to defy cooling challenges in Arab Peninsula and run two new sites for digital asset mining with a combined capacity of 250 megawatts (MW). 

The partner companies ran a pilot to indicate that thanks to their custom built immersion solution to cool the ASIC miners, operating mining sites on a larger scale in the UAE is now possible.  Construction of the crypto mining farms is already underway. The sites will be powered with excess energy, thus increasing the base load and sustainability of Abu Dhabi’s power grid.

Bitcoin block rewards sky rocket due to the recent Ordinals addition fueling NFTs

Bitcoin miners are racking up record revenue as transaction fees on the network have soared to their highest levels in two years. A miner's revenue is made up of two components: block rewards, currently set at 6.25 BTC, plus transaction fees, which vary based on network demand. Usually, fees are lower than rewards.

However, in recent weeks, some bitcoin miners are getting paid more to process transactions on the blockchain than they’re rewarded for creating new bitcoin, partly due to the Ordinals protocol. Ordinals allow for the inscription of non-fungible tokens and the creation of bitcoin-backed fungible tokens, known as BRC-20s.

These tokens have been used to create meme coins that have seen massive jumps in value in the past week or so. You can take advantage of this by trying to mine your own Bitcoin blocks with NiceHash EasyMining.

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