On Tuesday (March 26), cypto mining giant Bitmain Technologies Holding Company (“Bitmain”), which was founded in 2013 and is headquartered in Beijing, announced that the listing application it had submitted to the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong (“SEHK”) on 26 September 2018 had “reached its 6-month expiration date.”
According to an update earlier today on the website of the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEx), of which SEHK is a wholly-owned subsidiary, the status of Bitmain’s listing application has been marked as “Lapsed”.
Bitmain’s blog post expresses the hope that “regulatory authorities, media, and the general public can be more inclusive” to the young “cryptocurrency and blockchain industry” and the wish to “restart the listing application work at an appropriate time in the future.”
Also, despite its failed initial public offering (IPO) attempt, Bitmain remains positive since “the listing process has made the company more transparent and standardized” and more focused on those things which are important to achieving its mission. This re-focusing process started at the end of 2018, when it adjusted its personnel (i.e. made some layoffs) and operational model, such that it now has four main business divisions: mining hardware, artificial intelligence (AI), mining farms, and mining pools.
Bitmain also used this occasion to announce some important changes to its leadership. Haichao Wang, who was most recently serving as the company’s director of product engineering, and whom news outlet South China Morning Post had claimed (on January 10th) would become the new CEO, has now officially been named as the new CEO. As for Bitmain’s co-founders and co-CEOs, Micree Zhan and Jihan Wu, they will continue to be the company’s directors (chairmen) and help to “guide the company’s strategic development.”
On March 19th, Bitmain announced a new Equihash miner (which can be used to mine cryptocurrency such as Zcash and Aion that use this Proof-of-Work lgorithm)—Antminer Z11—that is apparently three times more powerful than Bitmain’s previous Equihash miner, the Antminer Z9. The Antminer Z11, which uses Bitmain’s latest proprietary 12nm chip, has a hashing power of 135 KSol/s and a power-efficiency of 10.50 J/KSol (which means a 60% saving in electricity costs compared to the Antminer Z9).
