Blockspace: IREN's 800MW in Australia, Zcash bug, and Google upscales to $84b

**Charlie** (0:05)
Welcome back to Blockspace Live. You got Charlie and Will this time. Collins traveling across the country on a secret Blockspace mission. We have a banger of a show today. We're gonna kick off monitoring the stretch situation. It appears to be crashing. Then we're gonna talk about IREN inking an 800 megawatt transmission connection agreement in Australia, going back to their homeland.
We got Zcash. Zcash is ripping, but we have some cold water to throw on it.
And Google was not done raising. They actually upsized it. We'll talk about that. And is this the coldest crypto winter ever? Joe Wiesenthal from Bloomberg thinks so. We're going to talk about that. Blockspace goes live on weekdays at 1 p.m. Eastern featuring quick hits on the latest in Bitcoin mining, AI and emerging tech, rather AI, emerging tech, and maybe a little Bitcoin that's sprinkled in. This is a podcast. If you are listening live, that's great. But if you're trying to catch it later, we turn to a podcast shortly after you can find that wherever podcasts are streamed. Will.

**Will** (1:17)
CoinDesk as well.
We're leaving the CoinDesk Network here shortly. So if you listen to us on CoinDesk, or have enjoyed listening to us on CoinDesk in the past, you're listening to it right now, be sure to go to your Spotify, your Apple, or wherever else you listen to podcasts and search for Blockspace and add us. Make sure to give us that five-star review and then hit that bell notification so you can get info whenever we go live or whenever we publish a show, which is around 5 p.m. Eastern. Again, this is daily hits on emerging tech, AI, HPC, and a little bit of crypto mixed in there as well. Charlie, really full show today.

**Charlie** (1:55)
It's a really full show. I want to emphasize, this show is brought to you by CleanSpark. Take our CLSK on Nasdaq. We'll hear more about CleanSpark later on the show. Yeah, Will, we have to monitor the situation. Look at this stretch.
Short duration high-yield credit by Michael Saylor is down 95 It dipped into 94 30 minutes ago.

**Will** (2:21)
Do we have a price tracker? Yeah, I've got it right here. Yeah, look at that for Yahoo Finance.
Another place you can find us is on Yahoo Finance later in the day as well. So down five bucks basically for a preferred, right? For those who don't know what stretch is, it's perpetual preferred and you get a nice high interest rate. It's not a debt instrument, but it acts like one. It's actually an equity instrument and it's supposed to trade at a par of 100 bucks. It's not obviously right now. It's been dropping ever since. Bitcoin went down, Saylor tested, sold $2.5 million worth of BTC to prove they could sell Bitcoin. Now the market is starting to run away with it. Charlie, where's the bottom for this? Is there a bottom for STRC?

**Charlie** (3:03)
I don't know, Will. The bottom for everything is technically zero. I have a hard time seeing that, but I think it was Francis who said last week, Francis from Lygos, he said, Saylor had $70 billion worth of Bitcoin lined up to fund stretch payments and dividends. But now with the Bitcoin price decline, now crossing into $65K, that's down to $50 billion.
He's got a giant treasury and a giant pile of Bitcoin to fund this, but that Bitcoin goes down whenever the price goes down.

**Will** (3:42)
I'm not super worried about this long term, to be honest. I think I've seen enough of these things.
There's a few things that might need to unwind. There is apparently a very large stable coin that has been buying stretch, and using that yield, quote unquote, as a reason for people to buy a stable coin and boot up. Maybe that needs to unwind in order for stretch to get healthy again. But I'm not super worried long-term. I think they have the cash on hand. I think they can just keep putting their MSTR ATM. I don't really see this completely unwinding at this point. I think the Ponzi is the Ponzi. It's going to keep existing.

**Charlie** (4:21)
Yeah, I'm not too worried either. We've seen, I think, stretch go down to 93 bucks and buy. But again, Bitcoin wasn't 65K when it did that last time. We'll have to see. Please save us, Daddy Saylor. I'm going to buy more Bitcoin.
My bags are sweating right now.
Okay, let's get into some fun news. IREN inked a big deal and they're going back to Australia, going global. So if you're not familiar, IREN hails from Australia. You can't tell from their accents, from Daniel Roberts, Dan Roberts' accent. They're from Australia. So IREN announced that signed a transmission connection agreement for a planned 800 megawatt data center campus in Bundy, South Australia. This is their first announced Australian data center campus, and according to the company, according to this announcement, one of the largest data center developments announced in the Asia Pacific region to date. Energization is expected to begin in 2028, and this brings IREN's total power pipeline to above 5 gigawatts.