By Marco Streng
CEO & Founder at Genesis Digital Assets
In April we announced the launch of Genesis Digital Assets and we’ve had many people ask us for more information since. The goal of this post is to answer the most common questions we’ve heard, tell our story, and to share the vision that we wake up excited to execute on every single day. For those who don’t know our full story, we’ll start there.
Our Bitcoin Mining Journey
Like many other companies, we come from humble beginnings. While Apple and Google started in a garage, our journey began in my college dorm room.
Dorm Room Mining
In late 2012 I set up my first miner. Every night I would fall asleep to the loud hum of these computers and soon, bitcoin consumed every thought I had. I left college shortly after to put all my attention into building a bitcoin mining company.
The Launch of Genesis Mining
In 2014, along with my partner Marco Krohn, we launched Genesis Mining with a mission to democratize bitcoin mining. We pioneered the idea of mining via the cloud and brought over 2 million miners into the mining ecosystem. We brought an unprecedented level of transparency to an industry that had a long history of fraud and deceit.
We set up live streams inside our mining farms so customers could see we had what we said we did.
We were the first to openly share photos and videos of our large-scale farms with the media.
And we invited journalists, producers, and other media from all around the world to tour our facilities.
This push for transparency set the standard for what customers buying cloud mining should expect and made it much harder for the bad actors to exist within the industry. Our focus on transparency also played a critical role in the accelerated growth of our cloud mining business and our business as a whole.
Growing Genesis Mining required us to overcome tough challenges and most importantly, we learned a lot. We viewed every bitcoin mining farm we built as an opportunity to learn and improve.
The Beginnings of Our Self-Mining Operations
As our cloud mining business grew, we began to use our know-how to begin building mining farms where we mine and hold for ourselves.
While our team was experienced with bitcoin mining, we were looking for a partner to work with who could help us increase the operational efficiency of our operations and drive higher profits. In 2016, we were introduced to three former mining executives Abdumalik Mirakhmedov, Andrey Kim, and Rashit Makhat and soon after realized what a group partnership there was.
In 2017, we entered into a formal partnership and built our first self-mining operation together. Combining their management experience and deep operational expertise with our technological know-how created a powerful combination of skills.
For the past four years, we’ve operated these self-mining bitcoin farms together. Because they were self-mining facilities with no customers, there was no brand behind this partnership. But recently, we decided to change that.
The Launch of Genesis Digital Assets
Last month announced the launch of Genesis Digital Assets, the new brand created for our self-mining operations. In recent weeks, many have asked us, why now?
The answer to this is simple: we’re going big.
For all of our history, we’ve followed a non-traditional approach to growth. Instead of raising outside capital, until recently we had self-financed all of our expansions.
But we’ve come to realize we’re in an incredibly unique position. We’ve had more experience building and managing industrial-scale bitcoin mining farms than anyone else in the world, our founders unique skill sets and background create a perfect team, and we have over 8 years worth of relationships with leading manufactures and suppliers.
To not utilize all this to its full potential would be foolish. Bitcoin mining is an arms race and in order to achieve our long term vision, we need to bring in outside investors. In early 2021 we closed a $125 million round from Kingsway Capital to fund our expansions. This is the first of many announcements to come as we continue our aggressive growth strategy.
A second question we’ve heard is, how are Genesis Digital Assets and Genesis Mining related?
The two entities operate entirely independent of one another because they have completely different business models and different founders. While they both mine bitcoin, they are very different from one another.
Genesis Mining is a business that serves over 2 million customers and as you can imagine, servicing two million people consumes a large amount of resources and most importantly, attention.
Genesis Digital Assets is a business that has no customers. The business model is simple: build massive bitcoin mining farms and hold the profits. No customers, no marketing, and no sales.
Going forward, we’ve decided it’s best to put our attention into rapidly growing the GDA business model. Genesis Mining will service existing customers but will not take on any new ones. 100% of our attention will go towards executing the GDA vision.
Powering the Open-Source Monetary Revolution
Our vision for Genesis Digital Assets is to take all our experience, know-how, and most importantly proprietary technology, to build the largest and most efficient Bitcoin mining operator in the world.
Together with my four co-founders, we believe decentralized money is the future and that mining is the backbone that makes it all possible. Powering this revolution is our why. It’s why we wake up every day and get to work.
While the future of the world seems more unclear than ever these days, what we do know is that the future will be decentralized.
By leveraging the unique expertise and experience of the five founders behind GDA, we are well positioned to succeed in our vision to be the leading infrastructure provider that will power the open-source monetary system revolution.
