Marco Andreas Streng is the chief executive officer and cofounder of Genesis Group, a

cryptocurrency A cryptocurrency (colloquially crypto) is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. Individual coin ownership record ...

business based in

Iceland Iceland is a Nordic countries, Nordic island country between the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge between North America and Europe. It is culturally and politically linked with Europe and is the regi ...

that is one of the largest

bitcoin Bitcoin (abbreviation: BTC; Currency symbol, sign: ₿) is the first Decentralized application, decentralized cryptocurrency. Based on a free-market ideology, bitcoin was invented in 2008 when an unknown entity published a white paper under ...

and

ether In organic chemistry, ethers are a class of compounds that contain an ether group, a single oxygen atom bonded to two separate carbon atoms, each part of an organyl group (e.g., alkyl or aryl). They have the general formula , where R and R� ...

mining operations. In 2016 he founded the Logos Fund, the first regulated fund for bitcoin and

mining in the world.

Early life and education

Marco Streng was raised in the German state of

Bavaria Bavaria, officially the Free State of Bavaria, is a States of Germany, state in the southeast of Germany. With an area of , it is the list of German states by area, largest German state by land area, comprising approximately 1/5 of the total l ...

. He studied mathematics at the

Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (simply University of Munich, LMU or LMU Munich; ) is a public university, public research university in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. Originally established as the University of Ingolstadt in 1472 by Duke ...

but left before graduating. His interest in cryptocurrencies and

blockchain The blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of Record (computer science), records (''blocks'') that are securely linked together via Cryptographic hash function, cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of th ...

technology developed while he was at university when he set up a mining operation in his student accommodation that was copied by other students. The operation ended when the electricity bill arrived.Iceland is a bitcoin miner's haven, but not everyone is happy.
Egill Bjarnason, aljazeera.com, 15 April 2019. Retrieved 17 December 2019.

Career

In 2013, Streng co-founded Genesis Group with Marco Krohn, a cryptocurrency business of which he is the chief executive officer. In 2014 he co-founded Genesis Mining, a cryptocurrency mining business that is based on a former U.S. military site in Iceland because of the low energy and premises costs in that country. The cold climate also helps with the cooling of the tens of thousands of computers used in the mining operation. In 2017, Genesis was described by

CNBC CNBC is an American List of business news channels, business news channel owned by the NBCUniversal News Group, a unit of Comcast's NBCUniversal. The network broadcasts live business news and analysis programming during the morning, Day ...

as "the world’s largest cloud-based blockchain and cryptocurrency mining company",How a cloud computing company is helping people mine for bitcoin.
Sameepa Shetty, CNBC, 15 December 2017. Retrieved 17 December 2019. and it was also one of the earliest large miners of the ether coin, carrying out mining activities for itself as well as renting out mining capacity to third parties. In 2016, Streng founded the Logos Fund, registered with the U.S.

Securities and Exchange Commission The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government, created in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash of 1929. Its primary purpose is to enforce laws against market m ...

, that was described by

Reuters Reuters ( ) is a news agency owned by Thomson Reuters. It employs around 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists in about 200 locations worldwide writing in 16 languages. Reuters is one of the largest news agencies in the world. The agency ...

as the first regulated fund for bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining in the world. He is the vice-chairman and co-founder of Hive Blockchain Technologies Limited, and the joint founder with the British technology investor Christopher Harborne of Singular AI Consulting Limited."Man in the Eye: Christopher Harborne", ''

Private Eye ''Private Eye'' is a British fortnightly satirical and current affairs (news format), current affairs news magazine, founded in 1961. It is published in London and has been edited by Ian Hislop since 1986. The publication is widely recognised ...

'', No. 1511, 13 December 2019, p. 10.

Selected publications

"Blockchain - The Case for Market Adoption of the Distributed Ledger"
in Claudia Linnhoff-Popien ''et al.'' (Eds.) (2018) ''Digital Marketplaces Unleashed''. Berlin: Springer. pp. 65–70.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Streng, Marco Living people 1989 births German chief executives 21st-century German businesspeople Businesspeople from Bavaria People associated with cryptocurrency German company founders