Binance is looking to hire ‘UK Version of Brian Brooks’, and Bitcoin miner revenue jumps by 50%

Binance is looking to hire ‘UK Version of Brian Brooks’

Binance is attempting to hire a former regulator or government official in the U.K. in order to lend the brand some compliance clout as global regulatory pressure mounts on the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange operator, according to two people familiar with the plans.

Binance is looking to hire “a U.K. version of Brian Brooks,” one of the people told CoinDesk, referring to the well-regarded former head of the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) who was brought in to run Binance.US in April of this year.

The search for a respected former regulator to represent Binance’s interests in the U.K. follows an announcement last month by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which said that Binance was not allowed to conduct any regulated activities in the country. As a result of the FCA’s action, British bank Barclays said earlier this week it was blocking customers from using its debit and credit cards to make payments to Binance.

Bitcoin miner revenue jumps by 50% in 4 days since record difficulty drop

Bitcoin miner revenue jumped after the network saw its biggest-ever difficulty drop. According to figures from monitoring resource Blockchain.com, daily revenues have surged by over 50%.

Bitcoin mining is currently in a unique state of flux — around half of the hashing power is offline as miners relocate from China, and it remains unknown how quickly they will be able to come back online.

At the same time, those miners unaffected by the Chinese rout have seen half their competitors disappear overnight, and profitability has gone up as a result.

With data now coming in for the past few weeks, the scale of the changes is plain to see. Daily mining revenue was around $20.7 million on Friday, the day before the difficulty adjustment. A day later, it hit $29.3 million, and by Tuesday this week — $31.9 million.