Bitmain
More info
- Creator
- Jihan Wu, Micree Zhan
- Released
- 2013
- Type
- Chip design / mining hardware
- Headquarters
- Beijing
- Website
- bitmain.com
The Chinese chip designer whose Antminer boxes long decided who made money mining bitcoin.
Founded in 2013 in Beijing by Jihan Wu and Micree Zhan. Bitmain designs ASICs — special-purpose chips that can do nothing but compute SHA-256 hashes — and sells them in the Antminer line. For a few years it dominated the market so completely that its shipping schedule effectively set the pace of the entire bitcoin network's combined hash power. It also ran one of the world's largest mining pools, Antpool.
A drawn-out power struggle between the two founders in 2019–2020 paralysed the company in the middle of a crypto downturn. Bitmain has also designed AI accelerators under the Sophon name, with mixed results.