Bitfury

Founded in 2011 as a bitcoin mining hardware manufacturer, Bitfury offers a suite of blockchain services including enterprise blockchain system Exonum, analytics platform Crystal, layer-two payment system Lightning Peach and music platform Surround. The private, for-profit Bitfury Group has raised $170 million, accepting six funding rounds spanning from 2014 to 2018. The company was founded by CEO Valery Vavilov and CTO Valery Nebesny in Amsterdam. 

Bitfury initially started as a bitcoin mining operator and hardware manufacturer, and it was estimated in 2017 the firm possessed the third-largest bitcoin mining operation behind Bitmain and F2Pool. 

In 2016, Bitfury announced it signed a memorandum of understanding with multinational consulting firm Ernst & Young (EY) to develop blockchain solutions for a variety of sectors. In 2017, the company launched Exonum, an enterprise blockchain software that enables businesses and governments to secure private data on the public Bitcoin blockchain. The product anchors verifiable data to the Bitcoin blockchain, costing only the transaction fees needed to store the information. 

Additionally, in 2017 Bitfury launched a payment network with payments provider Ripple for the second-layer Bitcoin scaling solution Lightning Network. Bitfury’s Lightning Peach platform offers tools for developers to build on lightning, a bitcoin wallet designed for lightning that is available to users and a suite of hardware and software solutions enabling merchants to accept lightning payments. 

In 2018, the Lightning Peach team tested the feasibility of lightning-compatible vending machines by creating a coffee machine connected to the Lightning Network. The device integrated a Raspberry Pi computer and a unique circuit board that successfully processed microtransactions. 

In 2018 Bitfury launched Crystal, an analytics platform that assists with the identification of criminal activities carried out through the Bitcoin blockchain. The platform can help businesses comply with anti-money laundering and counter-financing of terrorism regulations and can aid law enforcement agencies in tracing criminal transaction data and criminal networks.

In 2019, Bitfury launched Surround, an open-source music platform meant to solve the challenges of musicians and stakeholders in the entertainment industry. The product is intended to provide a means of securely transferring intellectual property, provide transparency in the exchange of money and rights related to intellectual property, and eliminate unauthorized usage of copyrighted material. The platform will be built upon Bitfury’s Exonum. 

In February 2019, Bitfury announced it would open multiple mining operations in Paraguay utilizing hydropower in plants Itaipu and Yacyreta. Later that year, Bitfury announced that it had started an artificial intelligence (AI) division, and said it would eventually offer hardware and software geared toward AI that would involve the blockchain.

In 2020, Bitfury was one of many companies to donate some of its GPU-based computing power towards coronavirus research.