Bitmain, the world’s leading cryptocurrency mining equipment manufacturer, has announced on Mar.26 that Wang Haichao will serve as the company’s new CEO, whilst admitting an imminent expiration of its IPO application.

The Beijing-based mega-seller of crypto miners officially announced the leadership change in a letter to its employees. Wang Haichao, the new chief executive, has reportedly taken over duties from co-chief executive Jihan Wu and Micree Zhan in a transition period that began in December.

The letter to Bitmainers in Chinese from its new CEO Wang Haichao and cofounders Micree Zhan and Jihan Wu

As per the letter, Wang has served as the head of multiple departments at Bitmain and made a significant contribution to the rapid expansion of the company’s supply chain capacity in 2017. Founder Zhan will remain as the chair of the company and Wu will serve as board director.

The company also admitted the reorganization and layoff at the end of 2018, or “personnel adjustment” as stated in a post released hours after the letter came out, claiming “It was a difficult but necessary decision as we continue to build a long-term, sustainable and scalable business”.

It turns out that some of the rumors around Bitmain circulating in the past six months during its IPO attempt have so far proved to be true.

The company reiterated it would put most of its efforts focusing on cryptocurrency and AI chips, at the same time, stating that the process of IPO has formalized and institutionalized Bitmain’s financials, and it has sufficient cash flow and sales performance goes well with the rollout of new products.

According to Bitmain website, its new Antminer models T17, S17, S17Pro, equipped with its 2nd-gen 7nm chip BM1397 released this February, are still not available, and its popular models T15, S15 and S11 have been out of stock.

In regards to its IPO, the company expressed its ambition to restart a new round of IPO application in future when the timing is right. According to updates from HKEX, the current state of Bitmain’s IPO application has turned into “Inactive” as of press time, indicating official failure of its push to go public.

The letter ends up with a positive prospect for crypto and artificial intelligence (AI), stating that

“In the next 3-5 years, the market of cryptocurrency and blockchain sector will be larger, and the market space of AI computing power will also be huge. The two enormous markets will interweave in the next three to five years, where power-efficient computing chips with high-performance are the common foundation and this is exactly our core competitiveness.”

Will the power and leadership shift from the alienated CEO duo to Wang who worked as a software programmer and product manager for 7 years before joining Bitmain lead the company back to its heyday? Leave your comment below.