Rooted in “computing power”, moving forward against the trend - Review of Bitmain’s “H1 report card”

September has come in the extraordinary year of 2020, and the global market and industry are experiencing drastic changes. In such a turbulent environment, Bitmain continues to deepen its own advantages, continuously refresh industry standards with industry-leading chip research and development, and launch superior products. At the same time, it insists on "computing power" as the core, further improves the business layout, and through industry-leading experience and knowledge, it has successively launched new businesses to support industry development and promote market upgrades.

New products lead the industry upgrade: 19 series breaks the industry record again

Product innovation with "computing power" as the core has once again won market recognition. The 19 series not only successfully refreshed the industry benchmark in terms of performance, but also achieved excellent results in market performance.

Antminer S19 Pro, S19

On March 1, Bitmain officially released the S19 series of mining machines, equipped with Bitmain's new generation of customized 7nm chips and revolutionary circuit architecture adjustments. This series redefines the industry standard and pushes energy efficiency to the extreme. The S19 Pro has a computing power of up to 110 TH/s, and an energy efficiency of only 29.5 J/TH±5%. The S19 has a computing power of 95 TH/s and an energy efficiency of 34.5 J/TH±5%. With the advantages of high computing power, low power consumption, strong stability and ultra-high cost performance, the launch of S19 Pro and S19 once again proves Bitmain's dominant position as a market leader.

Antminer T19

Antminer T19, released on June 1, uses the same chip as Antminer 19 and S19Pro, adopts APW12 power supply and upgraded firmware, and has a faster startup speed. Antminer T19 has a hash rate of 84 TH/s±3% and a power consumption of 3150 W±5%. Compared with the previous Antminer T17, T19 has achieved a significant improvement in configuration and performance, which can effectively improve the user experience and is a sincere work of Bitmain's T series.

Antminer Z15

On May 7, Bitmain officially released the new Antminer Z15, with a rated computing power of 420KSol/s and a wall power consumption of 1510W. The Antminer Z15 is Bitmain's third generation of mining machines based on the Equihash algorithm. The EquiHash algorithm is mainly used for ZEC (Zcash) mining, and can also be used for mining other currencies that use the EquiHash algorithm. Previously, the mining machine with the highest computing power for this currency was the Antminer Z11, and the Z15 has achieved significant improvements in both computing power and power consumption compared to the previous generation.

New business, orderly growth in the global market: Establish long-term strategic cooperation to ensure stable supply

In the past few months, Bitmain has achieved great success and has once again reached cooperation with many large customers through "long-term purchase contracts", establishing strategic partnerships with long-term and stable supply.

On June 27, Core Scientific, a US Bitcoin mining farm, announced that it had purchased 17,595 S19 Antminers from Bitmain. Core Scientific has more than 20 years of experience in managing data centers, and the company is currently committed to applying the latest AI and blockchain technologies to practical applications. In addition, Bitmain also cooperated with Core Scientific to open the first "Ant Training Academy (ATA)" in North America last year. The academy is located in Dalton, Georgia, and aims to enable North American participants to obtain the same level of training and certification services for cryptocurrency mining machine maintenance as in China.

Marathon Patent Group, a Nasdaq-listed North American mining company, announced on August 14 that it had signed a new order with Bitmain for 10,500 new-generation S19 Pro Antminers. Marathon Patent Group, located in Las Vegas, is one of the earliest mining companies listed on Nasdaq. The new order will increase its Bitcoin mining capacity from 3,020 mining machines to at least 13,520 mining machines, giving the company 1.2% of the Bitcoin computing network.

On August 18, Riot Blockchain, a cryptocurrency mining company listed on the Nasdaq, announced that it would purchase 8,000 Antminer S19 Pros from Bitmain starting in January 2021, with delivery expected in April. So far, in less than a year in 2020, Riot Blockchain has purchased a total of 20,140 Antminers from Bitmain.

New services promote the development of industry standardization: comprehensively improve customer experience

At the beginning of this year, Bitmain launched several important business deployments centered on "computing power", and successively launched leading services such as Supercomputing Center Researcher, Computing Power Guardian and R2-D2, providing customers with all-round support and maintenance for computing power deployment.

Bitmain Supercomputing Center Research Institute

Bitmain Supercomputing Center Institute (BSCI) is committed to providing blockchain practitioners with one-stop services such as supercomputing center site selection and investment and construction consulting, computing equipment hosting, and supercomputing center operation. BSCI is a global standardized supercomputing center overall solution provider. It can provide full-process consulting from project establishment, design stage, construction stage, and operation and hosting stage for customers who have computing center construction or computing center resource needs; at the same time, it also provides industry analysis reports for institutional customers, and provides more targeted capital layout plans to improve returns. The supercomputing center evaluation standard is based on the "Supercomputing Center Design Specification" formulated by Bitmain Supercomputing Center Institute. This standard evaluates supercomputing centers in multiple dimensions based on indicators such as project scale, operation and maintenance electricity prices, and policy risks. Ensure that customers develop long-term under the sound supercomputing center design standards and all-round evaluation system specifications, and truly realize the vision of "technology makes digital life better."

Hash Guard

At the beginning of this year, in order to accelerate the standardization of the blockchain industry and provide high-standard mining machine operation and maintenance, Bitmain launched the "Hash Guard" service for the global mining market. Hash Guard is a mining machine operation and maintenance team established by Bitmain Group in 2014. After 5 years of growth and development, it has formed a full-range professional team including mining machine operation and maintenance, maintenance, electrical, network, and system development. There are currently more than 300 on-site operation and maintenance engineers, more than 20 operation and maintenance solution technical experts, and more than 20 system R&D personnel. The business is distributed in more than 50 supercomputing centers in China, North America, Europe and Central Asia, managing more than 600,000 mining machines and a load of 900MW. As the oldest operation team in the market, operation and maintenance have always had a good reputation in the industry. At the same time, as a professional talent output, the Huangpu Military Academy has also exported and trained more than 500 professional operation and maintenance engineers to the market.

R2-D2

In early 2020, Bitmain decided to invest its energy into creating a new R2-D2 branch, which is the brainchild of Bitmain's strategic business unit and aims to better meet the needs of the next generation of mining technology. R2-D2 is an initiative that aims to promote investors to have the exclusive right to build their own Antminer. As part of the program, customers will enjoy one year of exclusive use. The main difference of the R2-D2 business and its products is that miners have the ability to become the creators of their own mining machines and can be used to mine other cryptocurrencies besides Bitcoin. The program will be undertaken by more than 40 Bitmain core design team members with more than 10 years of experience. For Bitmain, which has been advocating Bitcoin mining since 2013, this plan is of great significance and is an important layout for Bitmain to promote the improvement of the market and industry ecology.

Upgrading the training mechanism to build momentum for long-term development: Standardizing talent training

With the rapid development of the entire industry, the demand for professional talents in the industry has gradually emerged. Ant Training Academy is the industry's first mining machine maintenance certification course system. Based on past teaching experience, Ant Academy officially released the upgraded new mining machine maintenance training course in August this year. Through a number of optimization and reform measures, it launched training course arrangements and plans that are suitable for more people, aiming to attract and cultivate more outstanding talents and accumulate strength for the long-term development of the industry.

In order to welcome the widespread application of the S19 series in the future, the relevant training courses of this series are officially launched. In addition, the updated courses will be divided into long-term courses and short-term courses. The long-term courses will last for two weeks, and the short-term courses will only take 5 days. The class size will be reduced to 8 people. At the same time, elective courses will be added to return the right of self-selection to the students. Students who successfully complete the course and pass the assessment will uniformly obtain the "Antminer Maintenance Engineer Qualification Certificate" officially certified by Antminer. Among them, outstanding students will also receive additional rewards. A certain degree of tuition reduction will also be given to specific student groups.

The huge and growing market demand for professional talents and the industry's wide recognition of Ant Academy have enabled Bitmain to successfully expand this high-quality training service to more places around the world. In December last year, the first overseas branch of Ant Training Academy was officially established in Atlanta, USA. This year, Ant Academy will also set up branches in more regions and plans to recruit lecturers worldwide to establish an international teaching staff pool.

The journey is still long, but we must keep moving forward. But only those who can hold on to the darkness can see the dawn. Bitmain will continue to focus on "computing power", break through environmental constraints, lead the industry to improve ecological layout and upgrade, and explore more unknown possibilities.