John Warren announces investment in GEM Mining

This is the first business venture for multimillionaire businessman John Warren since selling Lima One Capital, the specialty mortgage firm he founded, in 2019

Multimillionaire businessman John Warren, who ran for governor in South Carolina and forced Gov. Henry McMaster into a GOP runoff, has been mining bitcoins while leaving the door open for a return to politics.

Warren announced his investment in GEM Mining on Wednesday.

He and four other founding partners decided to form the venture last year as the bitcoin marketplace began booming, Warren told The Associated Press ahead of the official launch.

We saw huge opportunities with our connections to mining, Warren told AP. He said the Greenville-based company will be the largest of its kind in South Carolina, and that he hopes it will soon be among the top handful in the country.

Warren said GEM has raised more than $200 million in institutional capital from banks, hedge funds, endowments and pension funds to operate more than 32,000 machines to mine Bitcoin.

Over 9,000 of the machines are currently operational, mining more than 400 bitcoins in the past nine months. Profitable since February, GEM said its November reported revenue was $7.8 million.

This is the first business venture for Warren since selling Lima One Capital, the specialty mortgage firm he founded, in 2019.

In other cryptocurrency news, WisdomTree is hoping a small tweak will win its bitcoin exchange-traded fund application the approval of the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC).

The company, which filed with regulators in March, recently said it is ‘voluntarily applying certain provisions of the 1940 Act to the trust in order to provide investors with some of the significant protections and transparency of the ‘40 act, including daily disclosures.’ The filing also names US Bank as the custodian, a first for a filer, according to the company.