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MicroBT designs and sells WhatsMiner machines and chips that miners use to earn bitcoin.
MicroBT builds the specialized computers that hunt for bitcoin. Its WhatsMiner machines are ASIC rigs — chips designed to do one thing and one thing only: run the SHA-256 math that secures the Bitcoin network and, if you're lucky, earns you freshly minted bitcoin. The company sells these rigs to big mining farms and to individual miners, and it also sells the chips inside them to other hardware makers.
The business is simple at its core. Miners buy machines, plug them in where electricity is cheap, and hope the bitcoin they earn is worth more than the power and hardware cost. MicroBT's job is to make rigs that squeeze the most computing power out of every watt, because in mining, power is the biggest expense and efficiency decides who stays profitable. It competes mainly with Bitmain, the long-time market leader, and with Canaan, another listed Chinese miner-maker. MicroBT's rise came partly from a legal fight: its founder, Yang Zuoxing, was a former Bitmain chip designer who left and built a rival, and the two firms have battled in court and in the marketplace ever since. The company is private, based in Shenzhen, and doesn't publish detailed financials the way a public firm would. Its fortunes swing with the bitcoin price and with the bitcoin "halving" — the roughly every-four-years event that cuts miner rewards in half and forces everyone to upgrade to more efficient machines or go out of business. Those upgrade cycles are MicroBT's boom times, when farms rush to buy new rigs. When bitcoin crashes or power gets expensive, orders dry up fast, and the whole industry — MicroBT included — feels it.
MicroBT is also exposed to the same forces hitting all Chinese crypto-hardware makers: tight chip supply, U.S. restrictions on advanced semiconductors, and the fact that China itself banned crypto mining in 2021, pushing many of its customers overseas to places like Texas and Kazakhstan. Still, the machines keep selling, because as long as bitcoin exists, someone somewhere is willing to burn electricity to earn it — and MicroBT sells them the shovel.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026