Virunga National Park, located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is the oldest protected area in Africa and a testament to the continent’s biodiversity and natural beauty. But the park has faced increasing pressure from local militia groups that have carried out violent attacks on its animals and employees, while various issues, including COVID-19, led to a prolonged closure of the park for tourists, which he claims represents approximately 40%. of your income.
A report in MIT Technology Review describes how the park’s director, Emmanuel de Merode, turned to bitcoin mining to monetize the park’s abundant natural resources that would otherwise be left stranded to preserve the park’s existence.
De Merode met with Sébastien Gouspillou, owner of Big Block Green Services, which advised El Salvador on its “Bitcoin City”. Gouspillou described how “(They) used to do mining buying electricity, it was not efficient. The money may go to the oligarchs of Kazakhstan. In Virunga, we see that he is saving the park.”
Gouspillou helped de Merode set up the first parts of the operation in 2020, which began mining in September of that year. The site then hired nine full-time workers to staff the facility, who work rotating shifts within the jungle to operate the miners. It is powered by three hydroelectric power stations within the park, a sustainable source of electricity that was already being used to power nearby towns.
“Today there are 10 containers fed directly by the plant’s four-meter turbines. Each container has a capacity for 250 to 500 platforms”, the report describes. Virunga owns three of these 10 containers, while Gouspillou owns the remaining seven. His arrangement allows him to buy energy from Virunga, while keeping the bitcoin mined.
Michael Saylor commented on the project, saying that Bitcoin is “the ideal high-tech industry to set up in a nation that has a lot of clean energy but can’t export a product or produce a service with that energy.”
De Merode described how, despite recent market downturns, he is still confident the project will succeed, saying: “We are not speculating on its value; we are generating it. If you buy Bitcoin and it goes down, you lose money. We are making Bitcoin out of surplus energy and monetizing something that would otherwise be worthless. That’s a big difference.”
He also addressed bitcoin custody in response to a question about what would happen if he were attacked, an ever-present threat in the jungle. “If I crash? The digital wallet is managed by our finance team… It’s unlikely we’ll be sitting on Bitcoin for more than a few weeks anyway, because we need the money to run the park. So if something happened to me or our CFO lost the password, we’d give him a hard time, but it wouldn’t cost us much.”
