Inside Bitewei: The $20 Million Bitcoin Miner Being Hailed as a Bitmain Rival

Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, Bitewei, a Shenzhen-based mining chip manufacturer led by Yang Zuoxing, the former director of design at Bitmain, has raised 140 million yuan to bring to market mining chips that long-time mining industry insiders believe could lead it to rival at least one area of Bitmain's business.

David Vorick, CEO of Obelisk, a company that set out to challenge Bitmain with an application specific integrated circuit miner for the Siacoin cryptocurrency, said he believes Bitewei proves that competition is possible, if difficult to achieve.

Published by Bitmain about its latest AntMiner S9 Hydro, the mining giant's flagship product has a power consumption that's around 96 W/TH. Speaking of growing competition from other bitcoin miners that recently launched products featuring 7nm chips, including Canaan Creative and GMO Internet, Yang.

Bolstering the enthusiasm for the company is that this isn't Yang's first industry effort, as his experience with bitcoin mining started long before he joined Bitmain.

After Bitmain officially rolled out Antminer S7 in August 2015, Yang said he had five rounds of negotiations with Bitmain about equity, all while keeping control of his designs for the Antminer S9 for the company, soon to be Bitmain's flagship product.

Yang said while Jihan Wu - also co-founder of Bitmain - agreed to offer him 2 percent of Bitmain's equity, Zhan did not go along with that plan and made an alternative offer of 0.5 percent.

Last year, Yang told CoinDesk Bitmain filed a patent infringement lawsuit against him over Bitewei's adoption of the so-called "Serial power circuit design" for Whatsminer - a technology that Bitmain secured a patent for in March 2016.

Bitmain co-founder Jihan Wu. has long been an outspoken supporter of the cryptocurrency bitcoin cash.

Analysts wrote in a recent report that Bitmain now holds about 5.7 percent of the total supply of bitcoin cash, which they said was "Likely" purchased using its operating cash and bitcoin holdings.

If Wu and Bitmain are bitcoin cash believers in their core, then Yang is simply the chip guy.