News linked to both this project and an event.
Odaily Benchmark has raised its price target for Hut 8 (HUT) from $85 to $165, citing the company's accelerated commercialization of its AI data center business and a total of $16.8 billion in long-term contracts for AI infrastructure. Analyst Mark Palmer stated that the commercialization progress of Hut 8's Beacon Point AI data center campus in Texas "has changed the company's valuation logic," significantly increasing the project's value.Currently, Hut 8's stock price is approximately $97, meaning Benchmark's new target implies roughly 69% upside. The stock had previously fallen nearly 30% over the past six weeks.According to Benchmark's estimates, the redesigned first phase of the Beacon Point campus will support 352MW of IT capacity, a 57% increase from the original 224MW plan. The base term value of the lease for this initial phase is approximately $9.8 billion, with an estimated annualized net operating income of around $655 million.Additionally, the lease agreement for Hut 8's River Bend data center, signed with Fluidstack and supported by Google, is valued at approximately $7 billion. The combined base term value of the two contracts reaches $16.8 billion. If tenants exercise the included 5-year renewal options, the potential total value could rise to $42.8 billion. (The Block)
According to PR Newswire, the Open Transaction Layer (OTL) officially launched on May 28 as an open industry initiative aimed at establishing a unified transaction coordination standard for on-chain finance. OTL defines shared protocols among institutions, non-custodial wallets, and AI agents for identity verification, messaging, and transaction coordination—covering the entire transaction lifecycle, including discovery, compliance, and settlement. The founding alliance comprises over 25 members, including leading financial institutions, payment service providers, and blockchain foundations such as Fireblocks, Checkout.com, Cross River Bank, MetaMask, Robinhood, Securitize, Wintermute, Solana Foundation, and Polygon. OTL’s technical specifications are built upon mature standards including W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and ISO 20022, and adopt a modular five-layer architecture covering Identity, Session, Transport, Messaging, and Application layers. The specifications have been published under an open-source license at otl.network, and the alliance is also open to additional institutional participation.
: Multiple institutions including Robinhood, MetaMask, and eToro, along with Fireblocks, Checkout.com, Cross River Bank, Securitize, Wintermute, and others, jointly announced their participation in the "Open Transaction Layer (OTL)" initiative, aimed at establishing a unified transaction coordination protocol layer for on-chain finance.OTL is positioned as an open protocol stack for coordinating identity verification, compliance validation, transaction messaging, and execution processes among wallets, institutions, and AI agents, addressing the integration fragmentation problem currently plaguing cross-institutional interactions in on-chain finance, where entities operate in silos.The current coalition members include payment companies, trading platforms, wallets, market makers, and custody and stablecoin infrastructure providers, including Robinhood, MetaMask, eToro, MoonPay, SoFi, Wintermute, among others, as well as foundations from multiple public chains such as TON, Solana, Stellar, and Polygon. (Financefeeds)
According to PRNewswire, Nasdaq-listed Bitcoin mining company Hut 8 announced an agreement with West Feliciana Parish in Louisiana, U.S., to invest $16 million locally to support the construction of an AI data center. The funds will be used to expand the local water supply system for the River Bend AI Data Center campus.