2. Bitpay
Headquarter: Atlanta
Bitcoin’s leading online payment processor
Providing merchants with ready-made software tools that they can use
to accept Bitcoin on their website or brick-and mortar store, as well as
an option that allows merchants to accept bitcoins without ever
handling them themselves.
Bitcoin automatically converts the bitcoins to the merchant’s local
currency and deposits into the merchant’s bank account.
Investment in bitpay: 510,000
SecondMarket
Spotify
Memory Delaers
3. Bit Instant
Offers services that help make it easier and faster to buy
bitcoins through bank transfer or cash deposit.
4. Coinlab
an emerging umbrella group for cultivating and launching innovative bitcoin projects
An attempt to establish Bitcoin mining on gaming computers as an alternate way to pay
for video games.
MMORPG mining
monetize players for the online gaming companies like World of Warfraft and EVE onli8ne.
Wurm Online: an independent MMO that allows players to dig, flatten, raise and shape the land
and create the frontier world they live in.
GraPighters: the first online fighting game for oyur hand drawn characters.
Give a goal charity mining software.
Raised 500,000 from seed stage Silicon Valley firm Draper Associates, Seattle angel
investor Geoff Entress, formaer assistant treasurer at Microsoft Jack Jolley, bitcoin investor
Roger Ver. Jolley.
Bitsent: SMS bitcoin texting service.
7. BridgeWalker
A bitcoin wallet.
Integrates a Bitcoin exchange.
Allow users to keep their balance constant in the fiat
currency of their choice.
Charges a fee of 0.75% per transaction currently.
9. Bex.io
Commoditize the bitcoin exchange.
Handle all aspects of Bitcoin exchange specially trading engine
and security.
Provide engines to bitcoin exchanges which will attract customers
and interact with local banking and regulatory systems.
Trading engines will be run on BEx’s servers in-house, and
exchanges will be able to interface with it via an API.
Creating system for clearing buy and sell orders between multiple
exchanges using Bex’s platform.
Coin based system for keeping track of fiat balances.
14. Cointerra
ASIC bitcoin mining with 28 nm chips.
CEO: Ravi Lyengar, previous lead CPU Architect at
Samsung., also worked at Qualcomm and NVIDIA.He is
joined by Chief Architect Dr. David Tnnenbaum, a
principal engineer at NVIDIA, VP of Engineering Jim
O’Connor who brings previous experience from an array
of firms including Nortel and General Electric.
15. Bitcoin ASIC Companies
Avalon
CEO Yifu Guo
110 nm chips
Presold 100,000 chips in large 10,000 unit batches.
Invested $200M by Phoenix Fund(based out of Zurich and backed by
Joe Lewis, the billionaire ForEx trader).
Teamin gup with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSM) to
take advantage of advanced 20nm processes.
AsicMiner
110 nm chips
Butterfly Labs
The business model is clever. A few whales, or big spenders on virtual goods, make up the majority of gaming company revenue while the infrequent casual players constitute the bottom 10%. “CoinLab wants to grab that 80% in the middle,” says Vessenes. They intend to accomplish this by offering a configurable app that players download from the gaming site which would allow bitcoin mining jobs to run on these beefy GPU-outfitted client computers.
Vessenes doesn’t want to refer to CoinLab as ‘just another mining pool’ because they have a distinctly different type of payout, but you can certainly imagine some non-gaming miner opportunities entering the CoinLab platform. After all, bitcoin miners and the mining pools collectively gain clout by virtue of the fact that a majority of miners is necessary to accept changes and slight variations to the protocol. It is easy to view the bitcoin mining pools as guardians of the free and open monetary system of the future — powerful de-central bankers if you will. CoinLab is poised to earn a seat at that table.
ASIC: application specific integrated circuits are customized components that perform the calculations necessary for bitcoin mining
The major question remains whether the plan is to produce consumer ASICs as Avalon has been doing or if they will mine with their equipment like ASICMiner does. Given the remaining market cap of bitcoins to be mined is around $1B at current exchange rates, and the fact that a single entity could jeopardize the security of the network if they control more than 40% of the network, the maximum this investment could return solo-mining is around $400M over the next 100 years. It then seems more likely that Phoenix Fund either expects a significant increase in the bitcoin exchange rate, or plans on reselling hardware to make a larger profit than the would be able to mining on their own.