According to the Wall Street Journal, KnCMiner is out of the home cryptocurrency mining market. The mining hardware maker behind the Saturn, Jupiter and Titan lines told the news outlet that even with $70 million in first-year sales, direct sales to customers was rapidly becoming a losing game.
The company plans to reposition itself as a cloud-based mining operation and chip designer, relying heavily on the $14 million cash injection it received from Creandum to launch a new dedicated hashing center.
That new facility, Clear Sky Farm, is located in northern Sweden, a region with plenty of cheap electricity and even more cheap cooling. KnCMiner currently controls about 7 PH/s, largely built from unsold Neptune units.
With even the best of the KnCMiner line now looking like an increasingly bad investment from an ROI perspective, and with a particularly painful series of delays making even pre-ordered equipment a loss of customers, the company has decided to close the door or direct-to-customer sales.
“We don’t like people sitting in these queues for five months. It’s terrible. We generate a lot of stress for people,” KnCMiner CEO Sam Cole told the WSJ. Cole also noted that hundreds of customers had opted to simply have their money refunded rather than take possession of the mining equipment. That unclaimed mining hardware may already be in use at Clear Sky Farm.
Cole also declined to say if cloud-based mining contracts were actually profitable for customers.“We don’t give indications of returns,“ Cole told the WSJ. "That would be bad for business. We are not a financial adviser. We cannot guarantee the performance they will get. The customer will have to do this.”