📆 Blockchain Week NYC 🚀Canaan $1bn IPO — Cryptos for the Rest of Us
By: Shan Han
Tags: Blockchain, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin Mining, Finance

📆 Blockchain Week NYC

What’s the Story

It was ‘Blockchain Week’ in New York with around 30 blockchain events held during the week. Of these events, ‘Consensus’ was the largest with over 8,000 attendees over 3 days.

How Was It?

There are mixed reports about the week. In particular, there were many criticisms of Consensus.

Tickets for the event were ~$2,000 (USD!) with on-the-door tickets costing $3,000. It’s estimated that the organisers, Coindesk raked in over USD12,000,000 in ticket sales alone. Coindesk run a cryptocurrency news website.

Vitalik Buterin, cofounder of Ethereum publicly boycotted the event, saying;

He’s also taken issue with Coindesk for their ‘gotcha’ reporting methods and alleged enablement of blatant scams. Coindesk is backed by Digital Currency Group, a cryptocurrency venture capital firm and have been accused of being biased toward portfolio companies.

Other criticisms of the event included registration taking over 1 hour, a dress code, and the notable absence of major projects like Ethereum and Cardano which boycotted the event.

There were many publicity stunts at the event. One company hired Lmabhorghinis to line the hotel front. Buying Lambhorginis with cryptocurrency gains is a popular meme within the community.

Another company hired actors to stage a fake protest by bankers against cryptocurrencies.

Fake protest ‘www.bankersagainstbitcoin.org'

Why Should I Care?

The Consensus event has gone from 2,500 attendees last year to over 8,000 this year. With the hype very much alive, it seems like interest in the market hasn’t disappeared yet.

Notably, many blue-chip companies were at the event, underpinning the mainstream interest in blockchain technologies.

There were many that expected the event to cause a rally in the crypto markets. However, this has clearly failed to materialise.

It will be interesting to see whether we’re at peak hype, or whether things will continue to snowball from here.

For those interested, here is the agenda/guide/magazine for Consensus.

🚀Canaan $1bn IPO

What’s the Story?

Canaan Creative will be filing for a $1 billion IPO in Hong Kong according to the South China Morning Post. Canaan Creative is a Hangzhou based company that produces 20% of the Bitcoin mining hardware in the world.

What are Miners?

When blockchain based transactions are verified, a ‘block’ is created and added to the chain. This process is done by a computer that solves a mathematical equation to create a block. This process is called ‘mining’ and the computer that produces a block gets rewarded in cryptocurrency.

The computer that solves a block will then broadcast their solutions over the network. Each individual computer on the network, a ‘node’ will then start verifying that the calculation is correct. If consensus is achieved, then the block becomes permanently attached to the chain.

Cryptocurrency miners have been incredibly profitable over the last year. As a result, demand for commercial GPUs and customised ASICs went through the roof. GPUs and ASICs are both computer chips that can be used for cryptocurrency mining. While GPUs are standard computer graphics cards, ASICs are customised chips that are optimised for mining.

Why Should I Care?

Bitmain, the market leader in mining hardware, was reported to have made profits of over $4 billion last year. This puts it on par with Nvidia which currently has a market cap of over $150 billion.

By comparison, Bitmain expects to post revenues of $1.5 billion next year, which puts the market into perspective.

Either way, a listing on the Hong Kong exchange brings the cryptocurrency markets one step closer to becoming a mainstream industry.

As an experiment, I ran a screening on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange to see what other listed companies are involved in Bitcoin specifically. Unsurprisingly there weren’t many, but Bitmain won’t be alone in being a listed cryptocurrency play on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

For those interested, here are the results of the screening.