The Blockspace Pod: Inside Tether’s 50 EH/s Mining Empire w/ Elektron's Rapha Zagury

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4.7 • 698 Ratings

🗓️ 27 February 2026

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Tether has quietly become the largest bitcoin miners in the world, and Elektron manages 50 EH/s of the stablecoin issuer’s fleet. Get your tickets to OPNEXT 2026 before prices increase! Join us on April 16 in NYC for technical discussions, investor talks, and intimate conversation with the brightest minds in Bitcoin. Welcome back to The Blockspace Podcast! Today, Rapha Zagury, CEO of Elektron, joins us to talk about the company’s management of Tether's massive 50 EH/s bitcoin mining portfolio. Rapha breaks down Elektron and Tether’s partnership, the incipient market bifurcation between AI/HPC and Bitcoin mining, and why he believes progress is directly correlated with energy use. We dive into the legal origins of Elektron, the company’s global footprint across 32 sites, and the future of mining as Tether and Elektron double down on hashrate while the rest of the industry eyes AI. Subscribe to the newsletter! https://newsletter.blockspacemedia.com Notes: * Tether runs 50 EH/s with Elektron * Greenfield sites trading at $1/MW amid AI boom * Elektron manages ~200,000 ASICs globally * Operations span 32 sites across 5 countries * AI and BTC Mining bifurcation expected in 6 to 12 months Timestamps: 00:00 Start 05:31 BTC market crash 07:59 Who is Rapha? 11:16 What is Elektron? 14:46 Swan & Tether legal struggle 18:00 Asset light build out plan 23:20 Business setup 25:05 Why mine? 33:18 Hashrate geographic distribution 38:54 Bad places to mine BTC? 40:50 AI & HPC 48:56 3.8% staff costs 52:11 Hashrate growth 57:28 There's ALWAYS stranded energy 59:44 Elektron IPO? 👉CleanSpark CleanSpark (Nasdaq: CLSK) is a market-leading data center developer with a proven track record of success. We own a portfolio of power, land, and data centers across the United States powered by globally competitive energy prices. Sitting at the intersection of Bitcoin, energy, operational excellence and capital stewardship, we optimize our infrastructure to deliver superior returns to our shareholders. Monetizing low-cost, high reliability energy by producing a global emerging critical resource – compute – positions us to prosper in an ever-changing world. 👉Luxor, Blockspace's preferred mining pool Bitcoin mining revenue changes every day. Difficulty adjusts. Fees move. Prices shift. And that makes it hard to plan. Luxor Pool’s Fixed Payouts let miners lock in revenue at a guaranteed daily rate for up to 18 months. According to Hashrate Index, miners who used rolling fixed payout strategies since the last halving have outperformed FPPS mining by up to 15 percent. Fixed Payouts give you predictable daily revenue, so you can plan, budget, and grow with confidence. With Luxor, uncertainty is optional. Learn more at luxor.tech/mining

Transcript

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0:00.0	People think that all electrons are the same right now and the sites are going out for sale,
0:04.7	you know, in very, very similar terms. There's going to be a flushing out. I think we're six months to a year away to actually getting to the point where, you know, that there is a repricing and kind of like a bifurcation of the of the market. We've seen Greenfield size go for a million dollars per megawatt, which is insane and crazy.
0:21.6	You know, if they are high-quality size, close to urban areas that have access to water, they have redundancy, right? All of these things that we know, yeah, HBC really wants, they are going to trade the premium and we're not going to compete for that power. We're not going to compete for those time. There's this misconception also that power is scarce.
0:38.2	Demand leads to innovation.
0:40.4	There's no other way around it.
0:42.4	And it's great.
0:43.3	This is a massive for humanity, right?
0:45.6	There is a direct correlation between progress and energy use.
0:48.9	And I think what we are seeing with the need for power for AI, for Bitcoin lining,
0:54.1	it's actually extremely bullish for human
0:56.7	civilization in the medium to long term.
1:01.4	Welcome back to the Blockspace podcast brought to you by CleanSpark.
1:04.7	One of the largest Bitcoin miners in the world is also one of the most profitable Bitcoin
1:09.8	companies, if not one of the most profitable
1:12.5	companies in any sector. And that is Tether. Tether has been quietly growing its hash rate portfolio
1:18.7	over the last few years, and it has 50 X-a-hashes of hash rate parked with Electron, a company
1:25.5	helmed by today's guest, Raffa Zaguri.
1:28.4	Electron is a Bitcoin mining management company that was spun off from Swan's Bitcoin
1:33.2	Mining team in 2025. Now, we won't be getting into the legal drama between Swan, Tether,
1:39.2	and Electron in this episode, but we will be touching on Electron's portfolio management of Tether's mining
1:46.1	assets, where Electron is mining in which states and countries, it is looking at mining in the future.
1:52.7	Also, what Rafa thinks that the AI wave will mean for hash rate and what exactly will be coming
	...

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