Bitmain is now betting that its next flagship product scheduled to be released by the end of this year will turn out to be a winner in the mining gear market, capturing an expected rally, according to a company source with knowledge of the plan.

It was the same strategy Bitmain pulled off in 2016, the person said, when the company launched its Antminer S9 model on the eve of bitcoin’s last halving. In the following year, the S9 accounted for an estimated 60 per cent of shipments among all bitcoin mining hardware.

The South China Morning Post spoke to over a dozen people close to Bitmain, including former and current employees, as well as business partners and a rival, for a sense of how one of the world’s most low profile cryptocurrency companies blew billions of dollars in funds raised before being forced to rein back its ambitions.

Bitmain declined to comment on most of the details in this story, but referred to its previous statements about the company’s adjustments.

Aside from betting on the new product, Bitmain is being forced to let go of asset-heavy or unprofitable businesses – such as mining farm constructions – to survive the prolonged bear market. This is in stark contrast to wild expansion when times were good. Bitmain’s new CEO, Wang Haichao, will have the difficult job of leading in a firm divided.

A little history

Bitmain was founded in 2013 by Micree Zhan Ketuan, a 40-year-old chip expert, and Wu Jihan, 33, who was then in private equity. Zhan has a 37 per cent stake in the company, compared to Wu’s 21 per cent, according to its IPO filing. By last August, Bitmain had completed three funding rounds worth a total of US$785 million, with participation from big-time investors including Sequoia Capital China and Singapore’s state-owned investment firm Temasek.

At its start, Bitmain’s business was simple, with Zhan leading the design of specialised chips for bitcoin mining, and Wu taking care of the business side. Zhan’s first mining rig, the Antminer S1, soon took off, which helped Bitmain ride a bull run in bitcoin in late 2013 and survive the subsequent crash.

The real game changer was the Antminer S7 and S9, two iterations of Bitmain’s bitcoin mining rigs launched in 2015 and 2016, respectively. Within the first few years of release, these two models became the dominant rigs in the market, thanks to their power efficiency at the time. S9, for example, accounted for around 60 per cent of shipments among all bitcoin mining hardware in 2017, according to data from Frost & Sullivan cited in Bitmain’s IPO prospectus. In the same year, Bitmain controlled an estimated three quarters of the market with US$2.3 billion in sales revenue, up nearly tenfold from a year ago.

The mastermind behind S7 and S9, however, was Yang Zuoxing, 45, a nuclear physics major-turned chip designer. He helped Bitmain develop its market-leading technologies during his year-long service as a part-time contractor with the company. But after failing to take a stake in the business, Yang quit Bitmain in June 2016. A month later, he started his own mining gear start-up, MicroBT.

The 7nm chips

Letting Yang go turned out to be a bad decision for Bitmain. MicroBT's Whatsminer M10 are now among a long list of new mining rigs with better power efficiencies than the S9, which remained Bitmain’s major product until late last year.

Last November, Bitmain rolled out two new models known as the S15 and T15 – the first major update to its bitcoin miner product line in nearly 2.5 years, as well as the first time it put its 7nm chips into test. By then its smaller rivals like Canaan Creative had caught up with their own 7nm chips, prompting analysts including Bernstein's Mark Li to conclude that Bitmain “may be gradually losing technological edge” before its IPO application.

When it comes to chip making, the smaller the process node generally means smaller transistors which are faster and more power efficient. As with smartphone giants like Apple and Huawei, crypto miner makers are also rushing to use 7nm chips in their latest products.

Bitmain said it will soon release its new S17 and T17 bitcoin miners, powered by the second generation of its 7nm chips, which the company claims is about 30 per cent more efficient than the first generation.

But both the 15 and 17 series are only transition products, because the demand for mining rigs is still low, and because Bitmain’s chip supplier, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), has no capacity available for its 7nm chips for now, according to a company source familiar with the matter.

A TSMC spokeswoman declined to comment.

The crypto market has been quiet in recent months as bitcoin hovers at around US$4,000, down from its record high of almost US$20,000 in December 2017.

The launch of yet another new bitcoin mining rig by the end of this year will be the first time that Bitmain has put its 7nm chips into full-scale production, as the company prepares for a recovery in rig demand as the bitcoin halving nears, the company source said.

Sceptics, however, note that Bitmain’s foray into 7nm chips is not a sure bet. Although Bitmain’s S17 is the best bitcoin miner in the market for now, rival Chinese companies including Innosilicon have 10nm-chip devices with close power efficiencies and are cheaper to produce, said Michael Zhong, an analyst with Beijing-based research firm TokenInsight. “If Innosilicon were to use the more advanced 7nm tech, it might produce more powerful rigs than Bitmain,” Zhong said.

“If Bitmain is still around next May, it’s unlikely that the halving would help to rescue them,” said Samson Mow, one of the company’s most outspoken critics. “The issue is that their machines are not competitive at all.”

Mow serves as chief strategy officer at Blockstream, a Canada-based blockchain software company which backs rival crypto developer teams to Bitmain.

Others opt to put faith in Bitmain’s track record. “While many rivals claim better chip specs and more advanced features, most have been unable to consistently deliver on-time and at scale as Bitmain has done for years,” said Jehan Chu, co-founder of Kenetic Capital, a crypto investment firm based in Hong Kong.

The crypto winter

In any case, a more immediate concern for Bitmain is to scale down the business to survive this crypto winter, after bitcoin plunged 70 per cent from its peak over a year ago.

Bitmain made US$742.7 million in profit for the first half of 2018, up nearly eightfold from a year ago, according to its IPO prospectus. The company had a US$1.1 billion profit in the first quarter of last year, according to leaked investor decks previously confirmed by a person with direct knowledge of the matter. These two figures suggested that Bitmain, in fact, had a US$395 million loss in 2018’s second quarter.

The loss probably widened to US$500 million in the third quarter, according to a report from industry publication CoinDesk last month, citing an unnamed source. Bitmain denied the report, but didn’t specify its financials.

While Bitmain has closely guarded its financial health since the IPO application, its smaller rival may provide a sense of how things went sour for Bitmain.

MicroBT’s Yang said his company earned 330 million yuan (US$49 million) in profit in the first half of 2018, but ended up losing money for the whole year, largely due to an inventory write-down amid the lacklustre rig demand. When the crypto market was at its lowest, Yang said, it was common for one rig to be sold at just one-tenth of its cost.

In Bitmain’s case, the company recorded a provision of US$391 million for inventory impairment by the end of June, up from US$139 million six months earlier, according to its IPO filing.

In January last year, after bitcoin reached a record high of nearly US$20,000, a new S9 rig was sold at around US$6,500 through third parties on the market, according to price tracking site camelcamelcamel. com. A year later, with bitcoin plunging to US$4,000, the S9 was priced at just US$250.

Bitmain’s reversal of fortunes is most obviously reflected by the retrenchments. Since December the company has slashed at least half of its 3,000 jobs, with numerous developer teams and regional offices dismissed altogether, the Post has learned. By the end of this month, it aims to further cut staff numbers to just 1,100, with about 700 people remaining based in Beijing, according to one former employee who viewed the plan.

Bitmain declined to comment beyond its previous statements.

One of the deepest cuts occurred to the chip developer team, which had about 1,000 people at its peak but now only consists of a few hundred. More than half of the 600 staffers in charge of the daily operations of Bitmain’s mining facilities were slashed. A 100-strong team responsible for scouting and building new mining facilities was dismissed altogether. Bitmain will take stakes in new mining farms, rather than building and owning them.

In terms of new crypto projects, Bitmain let go of the Copernicus team for developing bitcoin cash, an offshoot of bitcoin the company supports, but will keep funding it. Hashnest, a cloud-based mining platform, is no longer a Bitmain subsidiary but an external project funded by it. DEx.top, a decentralised crypto exchange operated by Bitmain, was sold to Chinese exchange operator Bibox in a deal announced in December.

Overseas offices in Israel and Amsterdam were shut. The Israel-based R&D unit dismissed 23 employees including Gadi Glikberg, Bitmain’s vice-president for sales and marketing.

The divided co-founders

The biggest change yet comes at the very top of the company. In December Wu and Zhan, the two co-founders, stepped down from their roles as co-CEO, replaced by Wang Haichao, a low profile engineer at the company. The decision was announced in Bitmain’s statement on Tuesday, and reported by the Post in January.

Wang had headed multiple departments at Bitmain and played a key role to expand Bitmain’s supply chain capacity in 2017, according to an internal letter about his appointment obtained by the Post. Before Bitmain, Wang worked at Beijing-based semiconductor design house Availink from 2010 to 2017, in roles that included software programmer and product manager, according to Chinese media reports. He graduated from Beijing’s Tsinghua University, sometimes dubbed China’s MIT.

Wang’s appointment was a compromise because Zhan and Wu found it hard to narrow their differences on Bitmain’s strategic direction, according to people familiar with the situation.

Wu, an avid advocator of bitcoin cash, wants Bitmain to have a presence in all parts of the crypto economy. Aside from its core business of selling mining hardware, Bitmain also builds and runs mining facilities that host those rigs for its customers and the company itself, and operates some of the world’s biggest bitcoin mining pools – online platforms where miners pool their computing power together to improve their odds of earning new coins.

Over the past year, Bitmain has become more aggressive in vertical integration with new projects in crypto trading and bitcoin cash development, as well as venture funding in crypto start-ups including Hong Kong-based Block.one and the US’s Circle. In July, Bitmain set aside an annual budget of several million US dollars to fund numerous open-source developer teams on crypto tokens including Bitcoin ABC, Monero, and Zcash, according to one person with knowledge of the plan.

But toward the end of last year, the person said, the company became short on cash and cancelled or dialled down some of these funding commitments. Bitmain had no comment.

Under current arrangements, Wu will be in charge of a new venture focusing on crypto-related financial services, according to people familiar with the matter. Bitmain had no comment.

Zhan, meanwhile, wants to take Bitmain on a different track, namely artificial intelligence. In 2017 Bitmain launched its first specialised AI chip under the brand Sophon, which is sold as part of a developer board or server for clients who want to train neural networks for specific tasks like facial recognition. In the IPO filing, Bitmain billed itself as a “strong contender in the AI chip industry”, one that could challenge the likes of Google and Nvidia. Still, non crypto-related business accounted for just 0.1 per cent of the company’s US$2.8 billion revenue for the first half of last year.

In Tuesday’s statement, Bitmain said that Zhan and Wu, the two co-founders, will continue to guide the company’s “strategic development” after Wang’s appointment. In fact, Zhan’s role will be the chair of the board, while Wu will serve as a director, according to the internal letter.

“2019’s focus is on customers,” the company said.