ambcrypto.com
Bitmain has been under immense pressure due to the bear market. The cryptospace is full of rumours and speculations about Bitmain’s S15 miners, as well as its alleged “distancing” from the Bitcoin Cash [BCH] Project.
@BTCKING555, a Twitter user known for providing an inside scoop into all-things related to Bitmain, tweeted,
Breaking: TSMC did not give Bitmain capacity! All given to 5G customers. There is nothing until Q4. Bitmain has ruined reputation and TSMC puts it in “low priority” customer list. Antminer 17 will be in very limited capacity – OK yield wafers perhaps 1200 at most! Thats peanuts
— BTCKING555 (@btcking555) May 2, 2019
A Lookback
On March 10, 2019, Samson Mow, CSO of Blockstream, tweeted a thread detailing multiple lawsuits Bitmain was facing, alleging that the company was “deep in debt.” In the aforementioned thread, Mow also said that Bitmain was trying to cherry-pick S15 miners from a total of 1000 miners that were produced and present them for demo to potential investors, in order to raise capital.
Another piece of news revealed by Mow was that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company [TSMC], a chip supplier to Bitmain, said that they did not have the 7nm capacity required to provide Bitmain for crypto ASICs, since the existing capacity at TSMC was already sold to Apple, Qualcomm, Huawei, and AMD, among others.
The Present
If what Samson Mow alleged was true, then @BTCKING555’s tweets raise even more questions, when coupled with previous allegations of Bitmain having unpaid “assembly, component, production, and repair companies.” @BTCKING555 further alleged that there could be few Antminer S17s out in the market.
Additionally, @BTCKING555 also claimed that the person leading the S7 and S9 project had left Bitmain. He tweeted,
“Sources say Dr. Yang who led S7 and S9 and left to start Shenma has better chip on 8/10nm node. Letting Dr.Yang and his team go was probably as dumb as selling all of the BTC and going all in for BCH 😭”
If there’s a grain of truth to these claims, Bitmain is in more trouble than previously anticipated.
Bitmain
Bitmain’s presence on crypto-twitter was unparalleled during the Bitcoin Cash hardfork. However, post the hardfork, Bitmain has been facing a lot of issues, ranging from a failed IPO to rumors of insolvency. Bitmain shared its plans to go public via a $12 billion IPO round on the Hong Kong Exchange. However, plans failed as the company let the IPO lapse, leading to speculations that Bitmain had shelved the IPO idea.