It appears that Butterfly Labs isn’t the only company having trouble making and selling specialized chips designed only to mine for bitcoins crazy fast. As Bitcoin buffs may already know, another rival firm, Avalon, has been having recent trouble getting its hardware off the ground.

Yifu Guo dropped out of New York University to start the company, and Avalon was the first to ship a consumer-grade ASIC miner earlier in 2013. But while the company shipped around 1,000 miners earlier this year, it’s struggled considerably since.

In a Monday e-mail sent to supporters and customers, Avalon wrote that it was offering a “full refund in bitcoin for all the Avalon Generation One orders made on any date.” To be clear, that constitutes bulk orders of 10,000 chips or more—each chip has processing power of 280 megahashes per second. The company sold those orders for 780 bitcoins or over $101,000 at present exchange rates. Avalon's earlier miners, which are powered by these same chips, used hundreds of chips running in parallel in a single box.

Avalon changed its business model earlier this year, moving toward selling the chips directly to hobbyists and other resellers. Earlier this month, the company said it would refund similar orders made before June 1, 2013. (The Butterfly Labs device that Ars reviewed earlier this year had a processing power of five gigahashes per second. The Jalapeño that Ars tested was able to generate about $700 in bitcoins after being run nonstop for two weeks.)

Avalon did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.

According to the Bitcoin news site CoinDesk, Avalon sent a separate e-mail back in March to notify customers that batch two deliveries were going to be delayed: "We are unfortunately going to be late. This should not be too surprising as the delay from batch one will no doubt carry over.”

In its e-mail to customers today, Avalon concluded:

Those who have invested time and money on Avalon Generation One based devices and clones can rejoice in the fact we had the foresight to make Avalon Generation Two chips completely backward compatible in every way with 110nm generation one chips, which can be expected to go on sale Late October 2013 for immediate shipping. Avalon will no longer participate in any kind of pre-ordering.

In the meantime, a company formed by chip design veterans, CoinTerra, announced a higher-end model to ship before the end of the year. Of course, as any serious Bitcoin user will note, the longer the bitcoin miners are delayed, the less valuable they become—after all, bitcoins get harder to mine over time.