Million-dollar BlockBox conjures up a fortune for bitcoin visionary
Bitcoin’s astonishing climb from US$1,000 to almost US$20,000 last year triggered a gold rush for equipment to mine the cryptocurrency and ways to use its secure database to record any kind of transaction publicly, chronologically and beyond the reach of authorities
A former New York hedge-fund titan deployed his giant, million-dollar BlockBoxes to Canadian tar-sands country. A Chinese financial technology pioneer runs his units off of hydropower in the Caucasus. A rich Russian with ties to the Kremlin keeps his in a communist-era factory on the outskirts of Moscow.
When it comes to scaling up bitcoin mining, nothing compares to the sea-container-sized BlockBoxes that are swelling the fortunes of BitFury Group’s Valery Vavilov, a Soviet-born blockchain evangelist, and self-taught microchip engineer Valery Nebesny.
The start-up Vavilov founded in Amsterdam and Nebesny joined after designing an energy-saving chip in a Kiev kitchen has sold more than 100 BlockBoxes in the last year and a half.
The BlockBox data centres, which extract about 15 tokens a month on average, have helped BitFury quintuple revenue for its latest 12-month period to US$450 million in cash and cryptocurrency, a result Vavilov said he expected to at least double this year regardless of bitcoin’s volatility.
“We realised our data centres needed to be mobile, to be both somewhere and anywhere,” Vavilov said in an interview in the capital of Ukraine, one of 16 countries where his 500 employees are based.