Blockstream, one of the largest Bitcoin Core funding contributors, has evidently bought a lot of cryptocurrency mining equipment from the Chinese electronics hardware manufacturer Innosilicon. Does this mean that the company is setting up its own mining center?
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Blockstream Buys Mining Equipment
Publicly available international shipping data (a bill of lading) reveals that a large amount of Innosilicon mining rigs has been imported from China to the US by Blockstream, the Bitcoin Core company focused on developing sidechains. Four containers holding 62 pallets marked as “TI” were sent from Hong Kong and arrived on July 26, 2018 at the port of New York/Newark, New Jersey.
“TI” is very likely referring to Terminator by Innosilicon, the ASIC manufacturer’s SHA256 miner whose latest version units are sold for $1118 USD each. And with each pallet possibly holding up to 72 units, this would mean that Blockstream could have bought about 4650 Terminators for a total value of almost $5.2 million. The company has not announced it is opening a new mining center as of yet, but such a large order would definitely suggest that is an imminent possibility. The typical hash rate of a Terminator unit reaches 17.2TH/s, giving such a center almost 80PH/s.
Background Information
Blockstream was co-founded by Adam Back, Gregory Maxwell, Pieter Wuille and others back in 2014, and is still headed by Adam Back, the CEO. It is now mainly known for developing implementation prototypes for the lightning network. If you are not familiar with the company and want to get more background information about it, David Shares recently published an Op-Ed about why is Blockstream working with former spies.
Innosilicon is a design company offering low cost, high-performance, cross-foundry, fully customizable solutions. It produces devices in areas such as tablets, cell phones, TVs, cameras, networking equipment and more. When Halong Mining launched its Dragonmint rigs earlier this year there were speculations that the machines were just rebranded Innosilicon Terminators.
Halong Mining is a scam. They sold re-badged Innosilicon BTC miners obtained through dubious means, and sold fake non-existent miners for other algorithms (customers *still* waiting for these to ship). They are huge scammers.
— Cøbra (@CobraBitcoin) April 6, 2018
What could Blockstream be doing with this much Innosilicon equipment other than set up its own mining center? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Blockstream, Innosilicon.
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