Interesting. Here we get the resume's of the actual IC designers, compared to HashFast who's IC designers are "anonymous"
Ok, so by 'well funded' they mean a $1.2m 'Angel investment' which for all intensive purposes will be spanked on the journey to tape-out. Also I doubt their own wages come cheap. So they are almost certainly a few mil shy of 28nm fab, therefore we can almost certainly assume another pre-order which will undoubtedly elicit a familiar response, but again is par for the course as they have no significant funding to manufacture otherwise.
Timewise it appears to be they will be head to head with Hashfast. Seed funding wise both Hashfast and Cointerra have tape out covered.
I'm not really sure if they would
need too. They could probably raise money from VCs if they needed too. Essentially doing what Labcoin did, but with USD instead of bitcoin and actual legal shares instead of "for entertainment purposes only" shares on BTCT. They had $1.8 million worth of BTC locked up in buy orders before their IPO, and they actually turned away 60% of it (which they didn't even need to do according to the way the site normally works, the operator had to write new code on the fly to turn down the money and distribute shares evenly)
There are all kinds of legal issues that would make raising money that way difficult in the U.S. But you can still issue shares to 'qualified investors' who have a certain net worth, as well as from venture capital funds.
Anyway, that said they do plan on offering pre-orders, according to their FAQ:
We’re expecting our price to be much lower than the current mining products for a given Gigahash performance. And we will offer substantial discounts for pre orders or large orders to help us with our production costs.
___
Hashfast have 'partnered' with Uniquify that almost certainly means they have given away equity for use of time, staff and deskspace and split costs associated with tape out...
We don't really know what the deal is between Uniquify and HashFast. It's not uncommon for companies in silicon valley to have "incubators" for startups, it doesn't mean all that much. HashFast may simply have raised a ton of money and simply paid Uniquify for their services.
It'll be interesting to see how Labcoin's designs turn out. Their claim is that they'll be able to get way better performance with a 130nm core then BFL, with their 65nm core by doing a hand-routed design. If these guys actually have a lot of experience laying out 28nm chips, then they may be able to get a similar performance boost over KnC.
They also seem to be focusing on low power use as well, which could be useful down the road as the market is flooded with ASICs and energy efficiency becomes the longer-term goal, as it started to become with GPUs.
Anyway, it's certainly an interesting new entrant.
In the short run, though I'm a little worried that we're just going to see a massive over-investment in ICs, with each company out there wanting to be the next ASICMiner - at the point where their mining revenue can fund more chip production. So we may see way more money thrown at the problem then can be extracted in any reasonable timeframe. At that point you'll see a shakeout in the industry, with only the most efficient companies able to make a profit while ever increasing their hashpower.
On the other hand, I think a big part of the spike from $10 to $100 in price was due to people who were GPU mining worried they'd never see profitability again. If the same thing happens to ASIC miners, who'd been selling coins we could see another price crunch - not in anticipation of a new generation of technology, but rather the extinction of the get-rich quick phase of bitcoin entirely.
Interesting days ahead. Anyway you get the point.
.
