President Donald Trump has promised to make the U.S. the world champion of cryptocurrency, and his family is poised to make billions off the industry.
Meanwhile, his former press secretary, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is leading a fight to regulate bitcoin mines in Arkansas. So far it has been tough going.
For one thing, Arkansas appears determined to wall off crypto mine ownership from Chinese-born Americans.
Yunpeng “Steven” Li and Qimin “Jimmy” Chen have sued the state, calling a 2024 law and rules promulgated by the Arkansas Oil & Gas Commission discriminatory.
Chen is a New York resident and former Walmart employee in Bentonville, according to his court filings.
He’s also the sole owner of Eagle Asset Holding Inc., which has a controlling interest over Jones Eagle LLC, now renamed Jones Digital. Jones Digital operates a bitcoin mining operation just outside DeWitt. Local protests reverberated when the computer hub was built, but judges have upheld its right to be there.
Chen claims that Arkansas crypto mine regulations in Act 174 of 2024, as well as more recent restrictions imposed by the AOGC, amount to industry-specific taxes and regulations on digital asset mining companies.
“Arkansas Secretary of Agriculture Wes Ward previously referred my business for an investigation by the Arkansas Attorney General’s Office,” Chen said. “I was concerned that the true purpose of this investigation was to … disrupt my business activities because of my Chinese ancestry.”
Li said he is a citizen living in California and the sole member of Compute West LLC. Compute West is the sole member of NewRays One LLC, which owns a data center in Faulkner County, near Greenbrier. He makes the same essential claims as Chen.
His court declaration says the data center is a $5 million project that he expected to generate $9.1 million in annual revenue.
Computer centers generating bitcoin are often extremely unpopular with their neighbors. Public officials have complained that they’re noisy potential polluters and water-wasting menaces that consume vast loads of electricity. Neighbors have claimed they compromise human and animal health.
Residents near the Faulkner County site told Arkansas Business nearly two years ago the noisy facility moved into their neighborhood with no warning. “Everybody’s upset about it, upset from the noise,” said Gladys Anderson, who lived nearby.
Danny Lane, another neighbor, said the mining company “kind of snuck it in underneath us.” Cryptomine supporters suggested he was racist because “they’re Chinese,” Lane said. “I’m not … but this was all done underhanded.”
Li’s court declaration said that NewRays responded to noise complaints with “substantial capital investments to construct sound remediation devices, including both a sound wall of enclosures of the machines operated at the data center.”
But the issue before Judge Baker wasn’t whether the mines were worthy neighbors, but whether the restrictions against them were unlawfully industry-specific or discriminatory.
Baker found that the Arkansas Cryptomining Association, which filed the suit on behalf of Jones Digital’s and NewRays One, was likely to prevail on its claims. So she enjoined the Oil & Gas Commission and the AG’s office from enforcing restrictions.
The governor issued a statement to Arkansas Business: “I am proud to be the first governor in the country to kick a Communist Chinese-owned company off our farmland and out of our state, and the State plans to appeal this ruling to continue to keep foreign adversaries out of Arkansas and stand with President Trump as he holds Communist China accountable.”
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