500.com to acquire 15,900 more Bitcoin mining machines in 2021

All of the machines are expected to be delivered in the second quarter of 2021.

The supplier agreed to purchase 5,900 bitcoin mining machines for a total consideration of approximately RMB55.2 (£6.3m/€7.1m/$8.5m).

At the same time, it also agreed to purchase a further 10,000 machines in a separate agreement.. The company will be required to pay a performance bond of RMB2,000 per machine for the first 5,000 of these 10,000 machines, or around RMB10m in total.

Assuming full delivery of the 15,900 machines, 500.com’s total hash rate, the amount of operations the machines can complete in the cryptocurrency’s code, will increase by around 1,000 petahashes (quadrillion hashes) per second.

The acquisition follows news in January that 500.com had agreed to acquire approximately $14.4m worth of Bitcoin mining machines from unnamed non-US sellers.

The hash rate of those machines – which refers to the number of calculations the machines can make per second in order to mine Bitcoin – was estimated to be around 918.5 petahashes per second. This means the new acquisitions would more than double the hash rate of the machines already acquired this year.

Xianfeng Yang was brought into the company to explore new business opportunities in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industries, and was appointed as 500.com’s chief executive in January.

Last week, the supplier entered into a share subscription agreement to acquire a majority stake in solutions business Loto Interactive.

Loto Interactive currently runs three major data centres, offering premises, hardware support, power supply, ancillary supervision and management to customers who partake in cryptocurrency mining.