Bitcoin mining company CleanSpark (CLSK) said on Monday that it has secured a $100 million credit facility with Coinbase Prime, the crypto company’s institutional prime brokerage unit.
CleanSpark’s shares rose about 6% in post-market trading following the announcement, pushing its stock up 51% for the year.
Securing the credit through Coinbase Prime means that CleanSpark won’t have to sell any of its bitcoin holdings in order to access additional cash, nor will it have to sell off its equity – which can dilute the value for shareholders.
The company said the new financing will be deployed into its strategic capital expenditures, which will include expanding its energy portfolio, scaling its bitcoin mining operations and making investments to build out its high-performance computing (HPC) efficiency.
Many bitcoin miners have been pivoting toward HPC infrastructure and powering AI data centers – especially as rising energy costs and global competition have made it increasingly difficult for many companies to turn a profit mining BTC.
But CleanSpark has not given any indication that it plans to abandon its bitcoin mining business, recently reporting that it had 12,827 bitcoins at the end of August, worth about $1.5 billion.
However, in a statement about the latest credit facility from Coinbase Prime, CEO Matt Schultz noted that the company would “take steps toward alternative use cases for some of our data centers” with the funding.
"We see tremendous opportunity to accelerate mining growth while simultaneously optimizing our assets, particularly those near major metro centers and in our immediate pipeline, through the potential development of high-performance compute campuses,” he said.
A summer of operational headwinds
This is the second bitcoin-backed credit facility that CleanSpark has secured from Coinbase Prime this year.
The company received $200 million in credit back in April.
"We see CleanSpark's innovative approach to expanding its capital strategy as a significant step forward for growing the crypto ecosystem through focused capital deployment," Brett Tejpaul, head of Coinbase Institutional, said in a statement.
CleanSpark joined the S&P SmallCap 600 index in March, but has faced some operational volatility in the ensuing months.
The firm disclosed in its Q2 10-Q filing in August that it has received invoices from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) claiming the company owes punitive tariffs on certain rigs allegedly imported from China in 2024.
CleanSpark disputes that, saying the seller “consistently” maintained the rigs’ country of origin was not China, as required under purchase agreements.
But the filing warns that if CBP successfully defends its claim and applies duties to all miners imported since April 2024, the company’s liability could reach roughly $185 million.
The company has also had a shakeup in its leadership after Zachary Bradford resigned as president and CEO in August and was replaced immediately by Schultz, a co-founder of the company who’d previously served as chief executive prior to Bradford.
Bradford had led the company since 2019.
Although no reason was given for change, Schultz said in a statement that as the company “continued to grow, the board believes that now is the right time for a change in leadership as we look to fully capture opportunities available to CleanSpark.”
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