‘Miner Wars Is Not Play-To-Earn, It’s Play-The-Hashrate,’ Says GoMining’s Jeremy Dreier

As institutional interest in Bitcoin mining continues to surge, GoMining stands out with its deep-rooted ecosystem, robust infrastructure, and innovative approach to bridging the retail-institutional divide. At the forefront of this evolution is Jeremy Dreier, Managing Director of GoMining Institutional and Chief Business Development Officer (CBDO) at GoMining.

With over 3.5 million users and 350+ megawatts of mining power under management, GoMining has steadily grown into a powerhouse in the crypto mining space. Now, with the launch of a $100 million Bitcoin mining fund tailored for institutional investors, the company is making headlines again—this time with an eye on strategic capital deployment, efficiency, and scale.

In this exclusive conversation with Benzinga, Jeremy Dreier—whose career spans technology, capital markets, and blockchain—unpacks GoMining’s institutional strategy, the dynamics behind their mining innovation Miner Wars, and what the future holds for Bitcoin mining in the U.S. and globally. Excerpt from the interaction.

What’s the goal of GoMining’s new $100M Bitcoin mining fund, and how’s the response so far?

GoMining Institutional created the Alpha Blocks Fund to give institutions the simplest possible path to genuine, yield-generating Bitcoin exposure. Instead of buying equity in a public miner or a passive spot ETF, allocators get pro-rata ownership of live hashrate that we actively compound: every satoshi the fleet earns is redeployed into newer, more efficient data centers, so the underlying BTC stream grows block after block. 

The vehicle is fully custodied by BitGo and is powered by the infrastructure with a total hashrate of 7.8+ million TH/s. Since our April launch, we’ve secured early soft commitments from institutional investors and are now preparing to onboard initial LPs. Capital deployment into next-generation data centers is set to begin shortly, laying the groundwork for stable, yield-generating performance from day one.

How is institutional capital changing the dynamics of Bitcoin mining?

A decade ago, mining rigs were whirring away in basements; today, the same activity sits on Fortune 500 balance sheets and is discussed on quarterly earnings calls. Bitcoin ETFs pried the door open, but once inside, allocators realised the real engine of value was the machinery behind the ticker, not just the ticker itself.

Those allocators arrive with infrastructure-sized expectations, they want yield that compounds, transparency they can audit, and governance frameworks their boards already understand. That has forced miners to professionalise everything from custody to ESG reporting while exposing the limits of the “grow-at-all-costs” playbook that plagued early public miners whose quick scale often came with dilution, leverage, and energy-price whiplash. As a result, many institutions now bypass listed equities and instead back managed funds or white-label strategies that deliver block-reward economics without the operational drag. 

The influx of deep pockets is also financialising the hashrate itself. What began with equity stakes has expanded into ASIC-backed debt, hashprice options, structured notes linked to network difficulty, and LP funds that treat hashrate as a yield-bearing commodity. That toolkit lets investors tune exposure to Bitcoin issuance, transaction-fee upside, or even grid-balancing revenues, and it’s breaking the old one-to-one correlation between mining fortunes and spot BTC. 

It’s no coincidence that the U.S.-based pools now command more than 40 percent of global hashrate, and trade volumes are emerging for hashrate futures on major venues – the capital is demanding instruments that look and settle like any other real-asset derivative.

3. What shifts have you seen in institutional attitudes toward Bitcoin over the last two years?Institutions are looking for infrastructure-related strategies because they want the economics of blockchain rewards, not just price exposure in the form of BTC on the balance sheet. They also want custody, governance, and transparency – features that are in line with what they expect from traditional investments in real assets or credit.

In 2023, most CIOs still asked whether Bitcoin would be regulated out of existence. The launch of U.S. spot ETFs, the MiCA framework in Europe, and political tailwinds in Washington changed that conversation from “if” to “how much.” A Coinbase-EY survey in January found 76% of institutions plan to increase allocations in 2025, with nearly 60% targeting more than 5% of AUM. The Bitwise/VettaFi adviser poll shows crypto allocations in client accounts doubling year-on-year to an all-time high.

4. How does GoMining Institutional’s white-label model work for allocators?

Think of it as “mining-as-a-service.” An allocator can brand a feeder vehicle, set its own fee stack, and rely on our global hashrate power of 7.8+ million TH/s, compliance, treasury, and reporting. All this comes with 99% continuous uptime, which is a really high benchmark for a fine-tuned data center operation. We handle power procurement, equipment refresh, SOC-2 reporting, and annual audits; they handle distribution to their LPs. Because we already run 350 MW across four continents, adding another 10 MW for a partner is accretive to everyone’s power curve. The result is turnkey exposure to clean, provably sourced Bitcoin that fits neatly into an alternative sleeve.

5. How does Miner Wars blend gaming with real BTC mining, and why does that matter

Miner Wars is not “play-to-earn”: it’s “play-the-hashrate.” Every NFT inside the game represents actual terahash running in our data centers. When clans solve in-game “blocks,” they’re competing for a prize pool funded by the real BTC those rigs earn. We now have an average of 71,222+ monthly players within Miner Wars and have paid out over 200 BTC since launch. That matters because it onboards a demographic that would never buy a miner or read an ASIC spec sheet, yet it still drives utilization for the underlying equipment. In other words, the game is a distribution funnel that keeps the hardware sweating 24/7.

6. What’s the current state of Bitcoin mining in the U.S. and globally post-halving?

The halving cut rewards to 3.125 BTC per block, so inefficient fleets were brutalized, but the winners are thriving. Hash-rate hit new highs as modern rigs at 14 J/TH came online, and public miners produced nearly $800 million worth of BTC in Q1 2025 alone. Many U.S. operators are stockpiling coins instead of paying selling, betting on price appreciation and the emerging federal Strategic Bitcoin Reserve policy. 

Globally, we see expansion into Paraguay and Oman, where stranded renewables and flare gas keep opex below $0.05/kWh. 

The key metric of this cycle isn’t sheer hashrate, but energy efficiency per delivered terahash, and the spread between top-quintile and bottom-quintile operations is the widest I’ve ever seen. Bitdeer’s February report nails how equipment cost per TH has fallen to $16 even as power prices diverge.

7. What trends will shape the future of institutional Bitcoin mining — tech, energy, or something else?

All of the above, but the connective tissue is flexibility. On the technology front, 3-nanometer ASICs will arrive alongside immersion and hydro-cooling systems that push efficiency below 16 J/TH, enabling high-density data centers that can moonlight as AI inference farms during fee lulls. 

On the energy side, flare-gas mitigation and behind-the-meter renewables give miners a seat at climate strategy tables; oil majors are already piloting modular gensets that turn 148 billion cubic meters of wasted gas into low-cost electricity, and allocators love the methane-abatement angle. But the fact still stands: even with new sources, the main factor in the energy market is the cost of energy itself.   Finally, capital markets themselves are evolving: as more governments stockpile mined coins, miners become quasi-sovereign infrastructure providers, opening doors to green bonds and export-credit insurance that didn’t exist a year ago. The winners will be operators who can toggle between Bitcoin blocks, AI jobs, and grid-balancing services without shutting down a single container.