A Momentous Bitfury Birthday
By: The Bitfury Group
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Bitfury, Company Culture, Exonum

This week, Bitfury enters our tenth year of operations. From our humble beginnings to the global European technology unicorn we are today, it has been an exciting (and at times unbelievable) journey. I’m both excited for the year ahead of us as well as incredibly proud of the work we’ve done. To celebrate, I wanted to share some of my favorite moments from the last nine years.

2011

I co-founded Bitfury after reading Satoshi Nakamoto’s groundbreaking paper on bitcoin and blockchain. It felt as if we had stumbled upon the launch of the next internet before anyone else. We began working immediately to design hardware that could make bitcoin even more secure.

2012

We invested in a production run of our first bitcoin chip (FPGA). We had no outside funding — it was just our dedication, along with the support of close family and friends, that made this happen. Our production run was a success, and we began selling our first product.

2013

After seeing how bitcoin network was evolving, we designed and launched our first bitcoin ASIC mining chip (55nm). What I remember most from this year was the excitement. Suddenly, more and more people were paying attention to bitcoin and wanting to get in on the ground floor.

2014

This was a great year for many reasons. Bitcoin was growing in popularity, and after we attracted our first external funding through our Series A round, we began to expand our team around the world.

2015

We realized that for bitcoin to truly take off, every part of the hardware stack had to be reinvented, from the smallest chip to the largest data center. We acquired Allied Control and their groundbreaking two-phase immersion cooling technology to help build better, more sustainable data centers. Today, this division is a leader in liquid cooling and high-performance computing.

2016

We built our cutting-edge bitcoin transaction processing center in Tbilisi, the Republic of Georgia, outfitted with our cutting-edge immersion cooling and our latest bitcoin mining chip. This data center set a new standard for bitcoin transaction processing around the world.

2017

We continued our industry-leading bitcoin work by partnering with Hut8 Mining, a publicly listed Canadian company, to provide their data centers with our cutting-edge bitcoin mining hardware. As we attracted more technologists into our team, we realized that blockchain technology was going to be just as game-changing as bitcoin. After years of research, in 2017 we launched our Exonum™ blockchain platform for blockchain applications and began to implement it in the land titling registry in the Republic of Georgia. We were no longer just a bitcoin mining firm — we were now a blockchain services company.

2018

We expanded our blockchain offering this year. Our Exonum platform was growing in popularity, and we successfully launched our Crystal™ digital currency compliance and analytics service. Our bitcoin division also launched its newest generation of hardware, the Bitfury Clarke™ chip and Bitfury Tardis server.

2019

This was our busiest year yet. We continued to build out our blockchain services with the launch of our music entertainment division, Bitfury Surround, which will use blockchain to improve the inefficiencies and inequalities in the music industry through the Surround™ platform. Our Exonum blockchain team expanded into enterprise blockchain-as-a-service with Exonum Enterprise, and our Crystal crypto compliance team expanded to offer analytics for bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ethereum, ERC-20/21 tokens, and Litecoin (and now Tether!) The second half of 2019 also saw us launch our artificial intelligence division, formalizing our expansion into an emerging technologies company.