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Bitcoin startup Blocktrail acquired by Chinese company Bitmain

Dutch bitcoin startup Blocktrail last month has been acquired by bitcoin mining hardware company Bitmain from China. The Amsterdam-based startup offers bitcoin wallets and an analytics platform, among others.

Due to the acquisition Blocktrail will rebrand to BTC.com, head of business development Alejandro de la Torre told StartupJuncture. BTC.com is Bitmain‘s block explorer platform – a tool that provides data about bitcoin transactions.

In a press release Blocktrail ensures its users that “during this transition of Blocktrail services into BTC.com, all of our services will continue to function as normal and no changes will be required on your side.”

Blocktrail team

The team will stay in Amsterdam, however only three people remain there: co-founders Boaz Bechar (CEO) and Ruben de Vries (CTO) and De la Torre.

“We’ve already hired one other developer and are looking to grow to be at least 10 members in less than a year. The other staff found other occupations”, De la Torre said to StartupJuncture.

Bitmain: highly active on the market

Jihan Wu, co-founder of Bitmain Technologies stated, “Blocktrail’s products, services, and team are highly valuable to us. We hope to utilize this acquisition to continue to offer better services and products to BTC.com’s customers worldwide.”

The Chinese bitcoin company has been very active in its sector, investing in bitcoin startups nearly every month this year – for a total of more than 10 million dollar. From February to May it invested in 4 companies.


Editorial note
: Although the news was from July, we still think it’s necessary to write about this acquisition. Bitmain, founded in 2013, already is one of the behemoths of the bitcoin era. The company is mainly known for its Antminer, a very popular piece of hardware for mining bitcoins. The acquisition also marked an interesting time in the bitcoin scene, where a lot of consolidation was going on.

Image: dry2 @ Pixabay

Lorenz van Gool
Lorenz is co-editor-in-chief of StartupJuncture. As a freelance editor and journalist, he writes about startups, innovation and (e)-business. Loves to report from conferences. Really likes cleantech and journalism startups. You can ask him anything about dinosaurs. Twitter: @lorenzroman

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