Bitfury

This full-service blockchain firm expanded from its roots providing bitcoin mining hardware to launch its own blockchain, plus software designed to help law-enforcement, banks and others investigate illicit activity using bitcoin.

Bitfury company logo

Bitfury is a diversified blockchain company, the largest industrial miner outside China, developer of software and hardware for working with the Bitcoin blockchain. The company has offices in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Hong Kong, London and Amsterdam. It has data centers in Iceland, Norway, Canada and the Republic of Georgia.

Bitfury Group is one of the market leaders in blockchain technology and one of the largest private infrastructure providers in the blockchain ecosystem. Bitfury Group develops and delivers both software and hardware solutions needed by businesses, government and government authorities, organizations and individuals to securely move an asset across the blockchain. Some of their software solutions include: digital assets PaaS, data analytics, lightning network, property rights registration, voting, and a chain hub. On the hardware side, they provide: Semiconductors and microelectronics, servers, datacenter construction, datacenters in marine containers, and immersion cooling.

The Bitfury Group develops and delivers both the software and the hardware solutions necessary for businesses, governments, organizations and individuals to securely move an asset across the Blockchain.

The company was founded in 2011 by Valery Vavilov. Initially, the company started to experiment and mine bitcoins, using CPUs and PC GPUs. It then began to design ASIC chip. According to Vavilov, in 2013 the company managed to develop a chip for 55-nanometer technology and adjust its production under its own brand. Start-up capital amounted to 110 thousand dollars of own funds, resources for subsequent growth provided a rapid increase in the cost of bitcoin, including a jump in the rate from 100 to 1200 dollars in November 2013.

In 2014, the company started mining using its own equipment in Finland, Iceland and Georgia- becoming one of the first "industrial" miners. The computing power of the company has long been in the Ghash pool.io. At the beginning of June 2014, the capacity of the pool, in which the share of Bitfury ASIC chips was about 45%, for some time exceeded 51% of the total computing power of the entire bitcoin network, which made "double spending" possible. To reduce the risk of centralizing the network, the company removed some of its servers from ghash.io. As of 2017, Bitfury controls about 9.5 % of the computing power of the Bitcoin network.

In 2014-2015, the company attracted 3 rounds of investments of $ 20 million, which was half of all global investments in bitcoin infrastructure in the middle of 2015. The evaluation of companies and investors' shares in the rounds were not disclosed. In a conversation with the Wall Street Journal, which took place after the third round, Vice President of the company George Kikvadze noted that the company is profitable, and investments were directed to the development of data centers and scientific and technical development.

The first round in May 2014 was attended by Binary Financial, Crypto Currency Partners, Queensbridge Venture Partners and ZAD Investment company, Georgian Co-Investment Fund and 2 business angels — former managing Director of General Catalyst Partners Jonathan Theo and member of the Board of Directors of Scribd Till Tai. A significant part of the second round of financing in October 2014 was provided by the participants of the first round — Bill Tai and the Georgian Co-Investment Fund, and Lars Rasmussen - Google co-founder - was among the new investors. The company attracted the third round of investments in May 2015 and was attended by Georgian Co-Investment Fund, DRW Ventury Partners and Russian iTech Capital Fund. Commenting on the news, RBC reported that this is the first Russian investment in the project related to bitcoin. The company advocates the wide spread technology of the blockchain outside of bitcoin industry. In 2015, the company joined the non-profit partnership Innovate Finance, which brings together key participants of the European financial technology market.

In June 2016, the company, together with the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs and the analytical center New America, opened the accelerator Blockchain Trust Accelerator Initiative for projects aimed at the use of blockchain in the public sphere.

At the beginning of 2017 — together with the law firm Covington & Burling organized the Global Blockchain Business Council, which was held in Davos in parallel with the opening of the World Economic Forum. It was dedicated to the cooperation of business and the state in the promotion and implementation of blockchain.

At the end of January 2017, the company announced its entry into the Chinese market and the creation of a joint venture with Credit China Fintech Holdings. The objectives of the new company are popularization of blockchain technology and sale of Bitfury equipment in China. Part of the agreement was 30 million dollars of CCFN investments, the recipients of which will be Bitfury itself and the joint venture.

Total revenues from mining and sale of chips — according to the company — for 2015 and 2016 amounted to about $125 million.