Crypto Miner Hut 8 Teams Up With Enthusiast Gaming for Multi-Year Partnership

Canadian crypto miner Hut 8 signed a multi-year strategic partnership with gaming entertainment company Enthusiastic Gaming to collaborate on new experiences and content, and data center hosting.

“As ambitious leaders at the intersection of gaming and digital asset mining, Enthusiast Gaming and Hut 8 will collaborate on new experiences and content within mobile and blockchain gaming, Web 3, [non-fungible tokens], and cryptocurrency,” according to a statement. Hut 8 will also provide “critical infrastructure support” by hosting Enthusiast Gaming in its data centers.

The new partnership will allow Hut 8’s content to be integrated across Enthusiast Gaming’s flywheel of communities, games, and experiences. “In the near term, we anticipate the benefits to Hut 8 will include connecting with an expanded crypto-savvy audience and potential new customers, while generating incremental revenue by hosting Enthusiast Gaming on our infrastructure,” Hut 8 CEO Jaime Leverton told CoinDesk in an email.

The gaming sector is rapidly changing as the number of video gamers globally is quickly approaching 3 billion with a projected 5%-7% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next few years, according to research by Messari. The gaming sector generated $175 billion in revenue last year and is expected to reach $269 billion by 2025, the report said.

Moreover, blockchain gaming has seen a rapid user adoption, while investors continue to pour money into the sector. In January alone, $1 billion was invested in blockchain games, on top of $4 billion already raised in 2021, according to the data tracker DappRadar.

“We’re excited to host Enthusiast Gaming in our data centers and collaborate on new experiences and content that will connect us to their audience of 300 million Gen Z and millennial viewers, the majority of whom are crypto-savvy,” said Jaime Leverton, CEO of Hut 8.

To kick off the deal, Hut 8 will be featured as a presenting sponsor for a significant upcoming update to its first-person shooter game EV.IO. The miner will also become a sponsor of Enthusiast’s Luminosity Gaming, the top esports organization on Twitch with a social following of more than 145 million globally.

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The deal comes as some miners are diversifying into non-mining business ventures such as blockchain gaming, NFTs and Web 3 projects. Most recently, another crypto miner, Argo Blockchain, launched an internally funded, in-house non-mining business unit to diversify its business and take advantage of other opportunities in the blockchain ecosystem.