Our Investment in Midas Labs
We are excited to announce that Proof of Capital led the seed round in Midas Labs, an ASIC design company built by the world’s most renowned blockchain hardware experts.
Midas Labs is an ASIC design company specializing in blockchain mining and AI applications. Their proprietary “super hash engine” design enables them to produce the world’s first reprogrammable ASIC chip, initially targeting support for all of the major hashing algorithms for digital assets on a single chip. Midas Labs also provides fully-customized blockchain support for communities and enterprises, including both hardware and software services. We are very excited to partner up with Jri Lee and his highly-experienced team of engineers and IC designers from companies such as MediaTek, Intel and Siemens.
The three main characteristics that got us excited about Midas Labs were the team, traction, and overall market opportunity.
Dr. Jri Lee and his team
Midas Labs has assembled a fantastic team of experienced ASIC design experts from Taiwan and Silicon Valley. One of the co-founders and CEO is Dr Jri Lee, a professor of electrical engineering at the National Taiwan University (NTU) and previously a researcher on high-speed IC designs at Intel. His PhD research includes high-speed wireless and wireline transceivers, phase-locked loops, and associated communication IC design.
Midas Labs’ founding members also include CTO Yi-Hong Chen, COO Kai-Wei Lin, and others, bringing decades of combined experience from leading chipset design companies like MediaTek and Siemens. They have advantages in mastery of the whole IC design process, ability to achieve time-to-market with products, and breakthroughs in technology to improve ASIC performance.
Traction — Shipped their first product and partnered with HTC
Midas Labs has accomplished all of their milestones in the past 90 days including:
1) Designing, building, and shipping their DeMiner App
The Midas Labs team has developed an application to allow smartphones to be able to mine CPU friendly digital assets including Monero which uses the RandomX hashing algorithm. Midas Labs was able to optimize every part of the system to squeeze out all of the performance possible, which is no easy feat on a smartphone.
2) Partnership with HTC
The Midas Labs team has launched their DeMiner app across all of the HTC Exodus smartphones which will provide them a great initial user base to launch their next products with. Their partnership with HTC was officially announced today, with media coverage including Forbes, The Block, and many others.
It’s very rare to see this level of efficiency, dedication, and traction in shipping new products, especially on the hardware and ASIC level.
Market — Asia is the center of Crypto Mining
Asia is home to some of the world’s largest digital asset mining farms, data centers, and ASIC manufacturing.The current global mining market is relatively concentrated with a few large players including Bitmain and Caanan. Midas Labs will be taking a fundamentally different approach by being transparent, seeking open dialogs, and partnering with developers and communities across all of the blockchain ecosystem.
We are super excited for the chance to back Jri and the whole Midas Labs team on their journey to become the #1 ASIC design company in the world.
PS — If you’re interested in building the future of blockchain hardware, Midas Labs is hiring.
