Sequoia Capital and IDG Capital are investing in Beijing-based Bitmain Technologies Ltd (比特大陸), the world’s largest bitcoin mining organization, according to people familiar with the matter.
Bitmain is raising US$50 million from several venture firms to boost its profile among mainstream investors, said one of the people, who asked not to be named because the matter is private.
Sequoia and the other firms also plan to provide the company with more guidance on management, the people said.
Bitmain, which produces chips and machines for mining bitcoin and operates its own mining facilities, has benefited from the rise in the currency’s market value, now about US$75 billion.
The start-up last month told Bloomberg TV that its own valuation is “in the billions” and it is weighing a possible initial public offering (IPO).
Bitmain has said that it is planning to produce chips for artificial intelligence and invest in mining facilities in the US.
Bitmain, Sequoia and IDG did not respond to e-mail queries about the investment.
The company led by founders Wu Jihan (吳忌寒) and Micree Zhan (詹可團) has been at the center of disputes over how to expand use of the cryptocurrency.
Operating the largest mining collective — a network of computers that verify transactions made on the bitcoin distributed ledger — Wu has championed the idea of increasing block sizes of the network that were previously capped at 1 megabyte to enable faster transactions.
Opponents have criticized the proposals for giving miners too much power and came up with alternative proposals.
A split occurred within the community last month, causing bitcoin to become two currencies — the original bitcoin and an offshoot called bitcoin cash.
China’s central bank said that initial coin offerings (ICOs) are illegal and have asked all related fundraising activity to be halted immediately, according to a notice from the regulator.
The People’s Bank of China said it has completed investigations into organizations and individuals who have conducted ICOs, and have ruled that the financing activities disturb financial order and shall be banned.
ICOs — digital token sales that have raised about US$1.6 billion — have been deemed a threat to China’s financial market stability as authorities struggle to tame financing channels that sprawl beyond traditional banking system.
Widely seen as a way to sidestep venture capital funds and investment banks, ICOs have also increasingly captured the attention of central banks that see the fledgling trend a threat to their reign.
A cross between crowdfunding and an IPO, they involve the sale of virtual coins mostly based on the ethereum blockchain, similar to the technology that underpins bitcoin.
However, unlike a traditional IPO in which buyers get shares, getting behind a start-up’s ICO nets you virtual tokens — like mini-cryptocurrencies — unique to the issuing company or its network.
That means they grow in value only if the start-up’s business or network proves viable, attracting more people and boosting liquidity.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts