Chinese mining equipment producer Bitmain has acquired bitcoin wallet developer Blocktrail. Two years ago, Blocktrail got financing from VKontakte co-founder Lev Leviev.

The amount is not disclosed. According to Bitmain, the miner plans to strengthen its position in the market of consulting and analytical studies. Apart from production of the Antiminer bitcoin ASIC mining equipment, Bitmain also manages Hashnest cloud mining platform, Antpool mining pool and BTC.com statistics website. Antpool currently accounts for more than 19% of the total hashrate volume in the bitcoin network.

”Blocktrail’s products, services and team are highly valuable to us. We hope to utilize this acquisition to continue to offer better services and products to BTC.com’s customers worldwide,” says Jihan Wu, co-founder of Bitmain.

Bitmain is going to implement Blocktrail wallet API and HD-wallet technology with the multisignature function to expand the BTC.com services portfolio.

“Bitmain is the world’s leading company in the bitcoin space. Joining forces with Bitmain will not only benefit both our companies, but also all our present and future customers”, says Blocktrail’s CEO Boaz Bechar. Along with Leviev, he is a co-founder of BlockCorp that invested in Blocktrail.

It is expected that Blocktrail will continue operating as normal and any changes will not affect its current clients.

In April 2014, Leviev’s BlockCorp invested €500,000 in Blocktrail registered in the Netherlands. He then told CoinDesk, that he got interested in bitcoin back in 2013 and the potential of this "breakthrough technology" struck him immediately.

“We are interested in bringing Bitcoin to the masses, to the widest audience possible,” he later said.

Elena Platonova