In a recent podcast called the Mining Pod, Fred Thiel CEO of Marathon Digital Holdings, a digital asset technology company that focuses on supporting and securing the Bitcoin ecosystem, discussed their launch in the UAE and their operating model which includes utilizing UAE’s fossil offsets and or nuclear energy. Market capitalization of Marathon Digital Holdings with a market capitalization of $1.19 billion is the world’s 4378 th most valuable company recently announced its foray into the UAE through a joint partnership with a subsidiary of sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi, called FS Innovation. The new entity in UAE will set up and operate two mining sites comprising 250 MW in Abu Dhabi, with FS Innovation controlling 80% of the project. As the majority shareholder, FS will appoint four directors to the board of the new entity, while Marathon will select one. As per the filing, the two sites are estimated to cost the two companies $406 million. Thiel discussed the overall

  Two professors at Qatar university came together to build a blockchain network from scratch that would not only be utilized as a ledger but also as a super computer. They named it Maxya given that its consensus mechanism creates added value by solving optimization problems for business. Lebanese-Canadian national Mazen El Masri, Co-Founder and CEO and  Syrian-French national Karim Yafi, CO-Founder and CTO, of Genesis Technologies, the tech company which developed Maxya, both Associate Professors at Qatar University started their project three years ago with a $2.6 million fund for an applied research program from Qatar National Research Fund, today they have launched MaxYa test net and are testing it with Qatar’s local sectors. The duo developed their consensus mechanism which they called “Proof of Useful Work”.   The Proof-of-Useful-Work (PoUW)” is an alternative mechanism for transaction validation that repurposes the squandered computing resources to beneficial use. Their mai