As a B#2 customer I just received this email update - my first email ever since the original order confirmation:
Batch one have mostly finished shipping, aside from a small number of orders with incomplete/wrong address or phone numbers. We've been getting these orders back from our shipper and getting in touch with people to update their information, this is a fairly quick process. If you have not gotten your order, especially people in Germany or Iceland that uses special characters in their addresses. I highly suggest you open a ticket with our support indicating your order number, full address with phone numbers, so if there is a problem we can pull up new information quickly and let shipping proceed. This also applies to batch two customers, please make sure your phone number is correct, and there is no typo in the address.
Speaking of batch two, we are unfortunately going to be late. This should not be too surprising as the delay from batch one will no doubt carry over. This delay also caused us to make drastic adjustments to our project timeline dealing with anything with a lead time like parts purchasing. We plan to start shipping majority of batch two orders starting on 15th of April. Not all the news is bad news however, originally around this period we are suppose to take this time to organize, make some changes and install a brand new SMT line in our facility. This upgrade will effectively double our production capacity, it enable us to put Avalon into the hands of our customer even faster. The new line is currently scheduled to come online during the last week of April. We expect batch two and three to ship much faster than batch one mainly there is no Chinese New Year and we have overcome the problems encountered in shipping batch one.
On to batch three, we at Avalon did not even wish to sell another batch. If you recall, our original plan was to produce only one batch, sell chips to thwart the centralization of mining, but due to the lackluster performance of our competitors we are here today as the exact centralization we tried to decouple. In addition, this delay is eating into our timeline for this project's future goals and various other projects. To be frank: it was a simple decision of build a mining farm ourselves and mine for a month or so to get the funding for things like the SMT line and next generation development vs. raise the price and sell units trying to get the money earlier to counterbalance the delay we have had. So, we came up with some terms and left the choice to the community.
More details on the F.A.Q. section of the Site. There will also be a follow up newsletter on chips for sale and the trade-in program.
