Skype Co-Founder Leads $13M Investment In Liquid-Cooled Bitcoin Mining Tech
by James · October 13, 2022
Cryptographic hardware technology company Fabric Systems raised $13 million in a seed round from investors to build energy-efficient Bitcoin mining hardware.
The money came from investment company Metaplanet, run by Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, crypto exchange Blockchain.com and venture firm 8090 Partners.
The investment from Metaplanet is not Tallinn’s first foray into crypto: an eager one Bitcoin enthusiast, the Estonian engineer formerly admitted he has most of his wealth in cryptocurrency, and has donated digital assets to businesses before.
Silicon Valley-based Fabric Systems will use the money to build an “immersion-native” Bitcoin miner and a general accelerator for cryptographic algorithms.
The cryptographic accelerator is intended to make calculations faster and more efficient on the blockchain, and allows for advanced cryptographic algorithms such as zero knowledge certificate-a cryptography method for proving that something is known without revealing the known information directly. The technology was first used by the privacy coin Zcash but Fabric Systems said the plan is for the accelerator to be used by other industries outside of crypto—such as real estate.
“Immersion-native” machines refer to Bitcoin miners that are immersed in a thermally conductive liquid to cool them down and make them more energy efficient, because the process allows more BTC to be mined with fewer machines.
Bitcoin mining – the process of using many computers to process transactions on the blockchain network and mint new coins – has been criticized for the huge amount of energy it uses.
To process transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain, mining machines must solve complex mathematical puzzles that take time and a lot of electricity – as much as entire countries.
This has been emphasized by regulators: The US government so last month that Bitcoin mining companies should use “environmentally responsible crypto-asset technologies” or be banned from mining.
Using immersion-based machines is just one of the ways to make the process more energy efficient. Such machines are a must for the industry, said Fabric Systems founder and CEO Michael Gao Decrypt. “If the industry does not wake up and pursue ESG [Environmental, Social, and Governance] as a goal, there are going to be regulatory actions,” he said.
“Dredging has benefits for noise and noise, and also from a water use perspective. We want to be at the forefront of making this industry more community-friendly,” Gao said.
