Crypto Mining Mogul Hits the Big-time with Portable Mining Containers

Serial crypto entrepreneur Valery Vavilov of Bitfury has struck gold again with his latest venture by solving two of the main hurdles in mining cryptocurrency with some big black boxes.

The BlackBoxes which are sea containers that have been converted into giant, portable mining rigs hold one hundred thousand of Bitfury’s signature microchips and are able to mine an average of fifteen tokens per month. Even at a million USD per unit 100 have sold in the last year and a half, beefing up the companies revenue for the previous 12 month period to $450 million in cash and crypto.

Vavilov along with co-founder Valery Nebesny, who started by designing an energy saving chip in the kitchen of their rented Amsterdam flat, examined the two most serious problems affecting crypto mining operations, electricity cost and government indecision on how to treat the nascent industry and came up with an obvious solution. Make the mining centers portable.

Vavilov spoke to Bloomberg about his BlackBoxes from Ukraine, one of the 16 countries in which his 500 employees are spread out, saying: “We realized our data centers needed to be mobile, to be both somewhere and anywhere,”

The company which says it expects it’s BlackBox sales to double this year also sells millions of its BitFury chips to third-party customers. Vavilov estimates that their microchips chips, which are made in Taiwan, account for as much as 15% of all Bitcoins mined, with 25% of that coming from the company’s own operations in Iceland, Norway, Canada, and Georgia.

Bitcoin makes up only about 50% of the major cryptocurrency market, including Ethereum and Ripple. Following the dominant force in cryptocurrency mining, China’s Bitmain, Vavilov has plans to roll out hardware capable of mining these and other altcoins in the near future.

Bitfury is involved in mining, sales, and manufacturing but for Vavilov, the real motivation is the potential of blockchain technology. He considers the technology as important as the development of the internet itself and says its future is worth trillions. He was quoted in Bloomberg saying:

“Imagine—some $300 billion of crypto wealth has already made its way into the hands of totally different, non-establishment people,” he said. “Most of these people, like me, aren’t interested in private jets or yachts, they truly want to change the world. Given how much wealth is in their hands now, I expect to see a lot of good new things in the next few years—in finance, health care, education—everywhere.”

Vavilov and BitFury have won over investors including Silicon Valley legend Bill Tai, Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen, and Moscow-based iTech Capital’s Gleb Davidyuk. The company’s software includes products such as Exonum, which “anchors” databases in Bitcoin’s blockchain and Crystal, which “de-anonymizes” suspicious transactions. Bitfury also co-owns Hut 8, a mining venture based in Canada, and Emercoin, another kind of virtual money.

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