November 28, Bitmain, the denominate cryptocurrency mining hardware manufacturer, disclosed its development layout for next year at the 2018 P.O.D New Block Trend Conference.

Jiang Heping, senior engineer of Bitmain disclosed that, currently, the firm is focusing on to things: one is redesigning a new Client node software for the public chain, and the other is to develop a smart contract platform that based on the two-tier network architecture.

Jiang also said that the smart contract platform based on the public chain was expected to be completed by next year, along with various application scenarios including STO and games.

Actually, Bitmain has exposed its ambition to stand on top of the blockchain pyramid and becomes an AI chip manufacturer just like NVIDIA. According to its financial reports, a large portion of their profit was used to enhance their research and development capabilities and expand the production output for high-tech AI ASIC chips and AI applications.

It was reported that the R&D costs of Bitmain raked in $87 million in the first half of 2018, increased by 683.8% for the same time period in 2017. The firm has put a lot of effort into technology development.

Bitmain has announced a “Sophon BM1880 EDB” 96Boards CE SBC featuring its new Sophon BM1880 AI chip plus dual Cortex-A53 cores that run Linux. This month, Ubitus, the largest cloud gaming platform in East Asia claimed that it will adopt Sophon AI chips and related hardware products developed by Bitmain. The world-leading mining giant is marking transformation to becomes a technical IC design company and opening up more application scenarios such as games.

Currently, the company has filed for IPOs in Hong Kong. However, analysts warn that as the regulatory issues and crypto market volatility have disrupted crypto-related companies’ plans for selling shares. Developing technology may be another road for Bitmain heading to success.