The Russian security of the Russian Federal Nuclear Centre has arrested several scientists that were allegedly trying to mine the cryptocurrencies on site.


Russian Scientists Mining Crypto in Nuclear Lab

Reported by the Russian Authorities, several engineers have been arrested who worked at a top-secret nuclear weapon facility, the All Russian Research Institute of Experimental Physics in Sarov, have been involved in a cryptocurrency mining scheme.

Founded in 1947, the nuclear facility is the place where the former USSR built its first nuclear bomb. It has been reported by the media sources that several unnamed scientists have been handed over to the Federal Security Service (FSB) on the discovery of the scheme.

A representative of Scientific Research Institute for Experimental Physics was quoted as saying:

“There has been an unsanctioned attempt to use computer facilities for private purposes including so-called mining.”

This tightly guarded Russian Nuclear facility has about 20,000 employees and the strongest supercomputers in the country. These supercomputers can run at one petaflop or perform a quadrillion operations per second and mining requires a huge amount of energy and great computational power.


Reportedly, the scientists were using the supercomputer at the facility to carry out cryptocurrency mining. It is basically an energy-intensive process through which new transactions are added to a Blockchain.

The security department at the research centre received an alert that the machine is connected to the internet. As per the sources, these machines are usually kept offline due to security reasons.

It has also been suggested that the scientists are most likely to face the criminal charges followed to their arrests as reported by Russian Interfax news agency:

“As far as we are aware, a criminal case has been launched against them.”

Russia is a Hotbed of Crypto Mining

There have been many reports of other industrial facilities in Russia being used for cryptocurrency mining. It has also been reported that a businessman even bought two power stations to perform this activity.

According to the sources, similar attempts have been registered recently in a number of large companies that have large computing capacities.

With its low-cost energy reserves, Russia is surely becoming a hot destination for cryptocurrency mining. However, with Russia all planned to launch its own official state cryptocurrency, it makes sense that it is cracking down on crypto mining operations.

What do you think of nuclear scientists making use of supercomputers to cash in on crypto mining? Let us know below in our comment section below!

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