MicroBT, the maker of WhatsMiner bitcoin mining hardware, said it would have 200,000 units of M20 series models delivered by the end of this month.

Yang Zuoxing, founder and CEO of the China-based bitcoin mining hardware manufacturer, said at the New Era Mining Summit on Sunday that the firm had already delivered over 100,000 sets of its latest M20 series models, and a total of 200,000 units is expected to be shipped by the end of this month.

Bitcoin hashrate surge continues

Since mid-June, the bitcoin network’s hashrate has increased by over 30EH/s, to which Yang said Whatsminer had contributed 30%-40% (about 10E). That meant about 200,000 WhatsMiner models (which deliver a hashrate of 50T on average) had started running in the past few months.

Its upcoming 200,000 units could contribute about 10E to the total bitcoin hashrate. Based on the production capacity of major miner makers, Yang estimated that bitcoin hashrate would increase by another 30% to 120E by the end of this year with numerous powerful miners from major miner makers delivered by then.

According to another leading ASIC miner maker Innosilicon, the bitcoin network currently has about 4.3 million mining machines run on it, yet the market is still seeing an increasing level of buying interest with 1.5 million mining equipment in want. If this market demand is fully satisfied, bitcoin hashrate will see a surge of 75E (assuming all are 50T miners).

While the supply capacity from chip manufacturers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Samsung remains a major bottleneck for the production capacity of all crypto miner makers. Yang said that crypto miner makers were behind other electronic device makers for smartphone and PC.

It can be seen that most mining hardware is future order or pre-order scheduled for delivery this December or January 2020

Bitmain’s latest challenger

MicroBT, known for its WhatsMiner series, was founded in 2016 by Yang Zuoxing who was Bitmain’s former head of chip design and allegedly the designer of its most popular bitcoin miner Antminer S9. The company rise to fame after its WhatsMiner M3 hit the market in late 2017.

The ex-Bitmain chip design director has been toiling hard to fight against his former employer and built his 3-year-old startup into a dominant provider for crypto mining chips. With 80 employees, Yang wants to keep the company small and efficient; By contrast, Bitmain has over 2,500 employees across the world by June 2018.

A Bloomberg report last October revealed that MicroBT was planning to file for an initial public offering in 2019. But the entrepreneur seems to be quite hesitant about its IPO for the time being, saying the benefit of going public is to open up a vast capital market but has to be subject to regulation; if they finally don’t choose to go public, they can focus more on their core competitiveness.

Yang told Bloomberg last October, MicroBT brought in more than 500 million yuan in sales in 2017, with over 70 million yuan in net profit. Its miner sales in the first half of 2018 was more than 1 billion yuan, with hundreds of millions yuan in net profits and roughly 100 million yuan in tax.