El Salvador started mining Bitcoin (BTC) using geothermal energy extracted from volcanoes.
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who led the country’s movement to adopt the BTC as legal tender, unveiled a teaser video to his 2.9 million followers showing clips from the new mining facility.
Bukele also shared a screenshot of a portfolio the country uses to collect the BTC generated by its mining operations. At the time of Bukele’s post, 0.00599179 BTC, valued at $286, had been extracted with energy from volcanoes.
“We are still testing and installing, but this is officially the volcano’s first Bitcoin mining operation.”
Bukele said in June that he asked El Salvador’s geothermal energy company LaGeoSV to create a Bitcoin mining facility using “very cheap, 100% clean, 100% renewable, zero energy. Emissions” from the country’s volcanoes.
The Central American nation, known as the “Land of Volcanoes”, became the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as its legal currency, despite protests and polls showing that a large part of the population does not disagree. .
About 25% of El Salvador’s current energy comes from geothermal energy, according to a report by Unidad De Transacciones, manager of the country’s electricity market.
Bitcoin changed hands at $48,061 at the time of writing, a 14% increase from the $41,002 seven-day low, according to CoinGecko.