Last fall, as soaring cryptocurrency prices touched off yet another round of investor mania, one of the biggest crypto miners in Washington state was already watching the exits.
Malachi Salcido, a Wenatchee miner since 2013, knew that crypto prices — bitcoin was near $68,000 — were about to do what they’d done several times before: tank. But rather than just ride out another “crypto winter,” Salcido stepped up plans to shift more of his business from mining to conventional data processing for other customers, a less volatile business that he increasingly expects “will be a majority of what we’re doing in the future.”
There’s a similar “been there, done that” vibe these days across much of the Columbia Basin, once ground zero for the U.S. crypto boom.
Though a lot of mining still happens in Chelan, Douglas and Grant counties, thanks to the abundant hydropower that miners prize for their energy-intensive processors, the basin’s crypto industry is a shadow of its former Wild West self.