Bitmine
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Bitmine AG was a retailer of Bitcoin mining hardware and Bitcoin mining ASICs, both under the name CoinCraft.
Bankruptcy
On May 20th, 2015, Bitmine AG was declared bankrupt[1][2]
ASIC
The Innosilicon A1 Booster / Bitmine Coincraft A1 ASIC is claimed to have been initially designed by Bitmine and contracted out on a 1-year exclusive availability to Innosilicon, LTD. Co. In its public declaration regarding its bankruptcy, Bitmine AG singled out Innosilicon as one of the major reasons for its bankruptcy, stating:
We engaged this company with a regular contract and entitled them to develop our 28nm ASIC based on our know-how and instructions, along with the full turnkey process of creating the mask, wafers and IC packaging. We had signed a contract that was expecting to guarantee us a one year exclusivity on the chip, however at a later stage we received proof that Innosilicon was plainly violating the contract from day zero and selling our own A1 chips to whoever inquired them directly
[...]
It is also worth mentioning that while we were struggling with thousands of junk chips, the A-grade ones could at all time be purchased in Hong Kong directly from their Chinese resellers, at some point even at lower prices than what we ourselves paid for.
On July 10th, 2015, Innosilicon, LTD. Co. responded to Bitmine AG's allegations through a post on the BitcoinTalk Forums[3][4], stating:
On behalf of Innosilicon Inc, the proud real owner of A1 BTC ASIC and A2 LTC ASIC, I would like to make it clear that we are very shocked to learn that Bitmine shamelessly pointed their finger to us for their business failure due to a series of their own engineering mishaps and reckless business risk taking. Innosilicon has done nothing wrong here and we continue to deliver our quality product even till this date. We have full evidence (email exchanges, legal contract, shipping record, business plans, apology letters etc) that Bitmine management tried to use Innosilicon as scapegoat to mislead their customers for their failure to fulfill their customer orders. We would like to provide full evidence to assist those who filed lawsuit against Bitmine. Our contact info is listed below and let us suit Bitmine liars. The world deserves to know the truth.