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Founded in 2013, Beijing-based Bitmain Technology remains at the heart of the crypto economy. With its flagship AntMiner bitcoin mining equipment still dominating the hardware market and its mining pools accounting for around a quarter of the computing power of the Bitcoin network, it retains an extraordinarily powerful place in the ecosystem by far the largest cryptocurrency and blockchain project.
That’s not to say it’s not controversial too. His voice support for a hard fork of Bitcoin (Bitcoin Cash) in 2017, following a controversial community disagreement, has conquered the company and its minds, many enemies.
This post is part of CoinDesk 50, an annual selection of the most innovative and consequential projects in the blockchain sector. See the full list here.
Over the years, Bitmain has been involved in many controversial developments to the point that the Chinese crypto community refers to its enemies as “mining avengers”. In 2017, Bitmain filed a lawsuit against Yang Zuoxing, the former head of design behind Bitmain’s AntMiner S9 who started a rival miner producer MicroBT, for patent infringement. But Bitmain eventually lost the case.
Then, in 2018, he filed another non-compete infringement lawsuit against the former creators of Bitman’s mining pool BTC.com, who left the company to start a rival service PoolIn, which became the first mining pool of Bitman. bitcoin in the world by total hash rate. .
Bitmain’s story began with Wu Jihan, one of China’s first bitcoin evangelists, translating Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper into Chinese in 2011.
It likely invested in the world’s first bitcoin-denominated initial public offering in 2012. It was a project initiated by Jiang Xinyu, aka Friedcat., Who was crowdfunding bitcoin to implement an application-specific integrated circuit for mining only. bitcoin.
The hardware sold well initially and sensational success followed. In 2013, Wu, with a degree in finance and psychology from the prestigious Chinese university in Beijing, decided to start her own company to produce mining hardware. He was joined by Zhan Ketuan, his tech-side partner, who, in six years, would find himself ousted from society in a Wu-initiated coup.
The latest Bitcoin halving event in summer 2016 marked the start of two years of extraordinary growth in Bitmain.
In 2017 alone, still just four years old, it made $ 1 billion in profits. He made another $ 1 billion for the first six months in 2018 and then went to a high-profile fundraiser in the summer, raising $ 700 million from outside shareholders on a bet. The deal is this: If Bitmain cannot go public within five years of fundraising at an agreed deadline, outside investors could require the company to pay back all of their investments with interest.
At the time, Bitmain boasted a hardware market share of nearly 80%. So the agreed deadline for the IPO was nothing but ambitious: raise at least $ 500 million with a valuation of no less than $ 18 billion.
A lot has changed in 2019 since its first IPO attempt failed in March in Hong Kong.
Its rising rival, MicroBT, whose founder won Bitmain’s patent infringement lawsuit, is seriously undermining Bitmain’s dominance in the market.
In 2019, Bitmain mining pools BTC.com and Antpool lost the top two spots to F2Pool and Poolin, the latter of which still has an ongoing case with Bitmain for alleged non-compete infringement.
When Wu Jihan returned in a coup in November 2019 to oust his founding partner Zhan, he told his people that he is back to save the sinking ship. Whether his tough comeback will work as he expected it has yet to be proven, although he looks poised to launch more powerful equipment to withstand the next halving.
It remains to be seen whether Bitmain can replicate the resounding success it once had after the bitcoin halving in 2016.
