Canaan Creative, Bitmain’s main competitor in the production of crypto mining equipment, has announced the release of a TV set with the capacity to mine cryptocurrencies.
The Avalon Miner Inside is a 43 inch TV that contains 16nm ASIC A3210 chips providing 2.8 TH/s hashing power. In comparison, the Avalon 841 -Canaan’s most powerful ASIC- has a processing power of about 13.6 TH/sec on average at the cost of about 618 USD. This would put it in direct competition with Bitmain’s Antminer s9J with a power of 14.5 TH/s for a value of 625 USD according to official figures
In the words of the Canaan Creative team, the TV will be powered by Artificial Intelligence, voice control, and all the other features of a Smart TV. However, in addition to the above features, it will also have some mining oriented functionalities: a hash rate and mining profitability calculator, and a platform that will allow users to purchase multimedia content with the mined bitcoin.
Canaan will provide the content services as well as the multimedia platform that will allow users to spend their bitcoins using Television’s own software.
The Chinese newspaper consulted with an analyst named Xiao Lei, who mentioned that the TV is nothing more than a marketing strategy without any significant use:
"IT LOOKS MORE LIKE HYPE… T WILL BE MORE MEANINGFUL IF THESE COMPANIES ARE ABLE TO EMBED THE MINING FUNCTION INTO EXISTING MAJOR TV BRANDS.”
Other companies have also taken advantage of similar concepts to sell and promote their products. Famous cases include applications and plugins for mining bitcoins, as well as blockchain-oriented smartphones.
Cannan is Expandind Its Horizons
The company says it seeks to expand its horizons and offer new products -such as this TV- that will allow it to grow and increase its market share:
“IF WE CANNOT MAINTAIN THE SCALE AND PROFITABILITY OF OUR SINGLE LINE OF SYSTEM PRODUCTS AND, AT THE SAME TIME, OFFER NEW PRODUCTS, OUR ABILITY TO CONTINUE TO GROW WILL SUFFER,”
Like Bitmain, Canaan experienced significant growth during 2017. According to figures published by the SCMP, Canaan made more than 27x last year’s profit and 230x the 2015 profit.
So far Bitmain has refused to comment on Canaan Interactive’s strategy; however, it is very likely that as long as ASICS’ production business is profitable, its production line will remain the same. Meanwhile, Jihan Wu’s business expansion will focus more on growing the company than expanding its products.
