Texas Senator Ted Cruz a.k.a R-TX on January 25, 2022, bought bitcoin valued between $15,001 and $50,000 taking advantage of the recent dip. This was revealed in a financial disclosure dated February 4 with the US Senate.
The purchase was enabled using River brokerage. On the day of the purchase, the bitcoin price was exchanging hands under $37,000. His profit on the transaction is anywhere between $2,000 – $6,850, considering he hasn’t sold his bitcoins and incurred any short-term capital gains taxes on the same.
Cruz has shown his support for crypto assets in recent months, even went on to introduce a resolution for merchants on Capitol Hill to accept cryptocurrency payments, and pushed for amended language to address industry concerns in the fiercely-debated infrastructure bill.
Drilling deeper, Cruz’s announcement of an amendment to remove the language in the bill is aimed at tightening reporting requirements for digital asset brokers. Some crypto industry players voiced concern over the definition of the broker as they claim it to be too generic, and could encompass any kind of entity.
That being said, Cruz’s state of Texas has also emerged as a major bitcoin mining hub in the U.S as miners reaped profits taking advantage of the state’s deregulated energy market in the backdrop of China’s crackdown on crypto mining last year. However, a powerful storm threatens to cut off the state’s vulnerable power grid.
Texas Governor Greg Abbot reportedly urged crypto miners to shut down their operations in order to prevent electricity loss and the repeat of a previous disaster that left a hundred dead last year amid the multiday outage. At least 10 million Texans were affected by the deep freeze that devastated large swaths of the state.
Texas crypto mining rigs lends a helping hand to brace a major winter storm
In the face of a major winter oncoming storm descending on Texas, crypto miners are scaling down operations to help ease the burden on the state’s crisis plagued power grid, as reported by CNBC.
Following that, Riot Blockchain, one of the biggest publicly traded crypto mining companies in America, began shutting down power to its Rockdale mine last Tuesday, a process it said occurs in phases.
Several other crypto miners across Texas have followed suit involuntarily reducing energy consumption in the wake of the arctic blast.