Two companies involved in the digital currency mining space are joining forces, melding hardware expertise with consumer mining services.

CloudHashing, which offers cloud mining contracts, is merging with enterprise ASIC hardware designer HighBitcoin to form a new entity called PeerNova.

The combined company is planning to sell mining infrastructure services at an enterprise level under the PeerNova name, while CloudHashing will continue as a brand selling mining contracts, effectively allowing CloudHashing to take advantage of HighBitcoin’s expertise with ASIC hardware design for its consumer mining services.

Further, it enables the combined company to offer distributed consumer applications in the future, leveraging the power of bitcoin’s block chain.

PeerNova will also be bringing on Atiq Raza, formerly President & COO of AMD, as chairman.

In a prepared statement, Raza said:

“This merger marries the best of breed in the bitcoin space and technology veterans from Silicon Valley. We will be building a suite of software applications and technology platforms to address this rapidly growing market.”

Proprietary hardware

CloudHashing CEO Emmanuel Abiodun recently told CoinDesk that the company had been hardware agnostic, ordering its mining equipment from all of the top manufacturers in the industry for its cloud mining service.

Abiodun now says that CloudHashing, under the PeerNova umbrella, will use HighBitcoin’s ASIC technology exclusively.

Abiodum said:

“We are one company now, PeerNova. We will be using our own hardware going forward.”

HighBitcoin has been focused on a high-level architecture built for datacenter efficiency.

Consumer vs enterprise

The combined company will have two distinct divisions, according to Abiodun, who will become president of the merged organization, with HighBitcoin’s Naveed Sherwani serving as CEO.

CloudHashing will remain focused on allowing the average person to gain access to bitcoin mining via contracts. The company currently operates one of the top 10 pools on the Bitcoin network, and has almost 3.95PH/s of power according to its website.

PeerNova will take on HighBitcoin’s previous role of providing enterprise-grade mining products and services.

Abiodun told CoinDesk that this includes designing and manufacturing ASIC hardware. It is currently selling racks to enterprise-level mines with a minimum of 20 40TH/s machines per order.

Regulation

The news follows a new ruling by FinCEN that has resulted in increased clarity for the cloud mining industry.

On 29 April, the anti-money laundering unit of the US Treasury released a letter informing companies that cloud mining should be considered a rental of computing hardware, not a money transmitter service. This paves the way for mining-as-a-service companies such as CloudHashing to operate without the need for pricey money transmitter licenses.

Sherwani said that PeerNova will also be looking at distributed applications as new lines of business as well.

He concluded:

“Disruptive technologies [that have] widespread applications in digital currency transactions, remittances, smart contracts, digital coupons, loyalty programs and others”

Disclaimer: This article should not be viewed as an endorsement of any of the companies mentioned. Please do your own extensive research before considering investing any funds in these products.