Bitcoin miners won’t just mine Bitcoin — they’ll become full-blown energy companies. That’s the future, says Evan Owens, VP of Business Development at Kadena.
“Bitcoin miners today are obviously mining Bitcoin, but in 10 years, they’ll be energy companies, and Bitcoin mining will be a small part of that,” Owens told TheStreet Roundtable’s Jackson Hinkle. He believes critics have misunderstood how mining will evolve — and that the industry will end up helping to rebuild America’s energy infrastructure and power up undeveloped nations.
Built by ex-J.P. Morgan developers, Kadena is a layer 1 that doubles down on proof-of-work (PoW) but manages to be significantly more efficient than Bitcoin and other PoW protocols.
“There are architectural changes [our founders] thought about when they built Kadena… The way they architected Chainweb mitigates that,” Owens explained.
Chainweb is Kadena’s multi-chain architecture that allows multiple PoW chains to run in parallel. Transactions are spread out, making the system far more scalable and efficient without sacrificing the core security of PoW.
“Our miners use far less energy than even Bitcoin proof-of-work miners,” he noted. While PoW remains energy-intensive by nature, Kadena argues that it doesn’t have to be the villain it’s often made out to be. As crypto matures, sustainability may hinge less on abandoning PoW and more on reimagining it.
Owens pointed to real-world examples of innovation in mining. He highlighted Crusoe Energy, a startup using flared gas from oil fields in North Dakota to power mining rigs. “When mining natural gas, there’s usually offshoot gas that goes to waste—they use that to power mining rigs.”
This model — turning what would be wasted energy into usable power for mining — could be the key to reshaping the image of crypto. Instead of being energy hogs, miners could become key players in renewable and decentralized power systems.
“I think people have completely mistaken what the impact of miners is gonna be,” Owens said.
