Wu Jihan a co-founder of Bitmain Technologies has gathered a group of mining giant’s former employees to start a new cryptocurrency economic services startup, hoping to profit on Bitcoin’s resurgence.
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Wu’s latest endeavour is a one-stop platform for over-the-counter selling, lending and supervision for digital assets and is known as Matrixport. The experiment went live on Monday after spinning off from Bitmain in January, when the world’s biggest producer of crypto-mining rigs ran into a cash crunch.
Wu is a major shareholder along with a part of worldwide venture capital companies and Bitmain itself. Matrixport team includes 100 employees, dozens of whom were let go from Bitmain. The headquarter of the company is in Singapore. Precise details about the corporation’s funding will be published at a later date, the company’s Chief Executive Officer Ge Yuesheng said.
“We are firmly tied to Bitmain by our origin,” Ge, a Bitmain shareholder himself, said in an interview. “But because we work in different businesses, we are partners rather than competitors.”
A representative from Bitmain didn’t comment on the company’s or Wu’s connections to Matrixport.