For cryptocurrency pioneer GigaWatt, the hits just keep coming. On Tuesday, as the bitcoin market continued its weeks-long swoon, employees of the East Wenatchee, Washington, company, which hosts thousands of computer servers for cryptocurrency mining, learned that the company’s owners had put it in chapter 11, the Seattle Times reported. Monday’s bankruptcy move follows the August departure of GigaWatt co-founder David Carlson. This month the company’s landlord began eviction proceedings. Carlson, a former Microsoft engineer who began mining bitcoin as a hobby in 2012, was among the first miners to tap the cheap hydropower of Central Washington. In 2013, Carlson built what was then the world’s largest bitcoin mine, in an old furniture store in downtown Wenatchee, and later expanded into hosting services for other miners. In 2017, as prices for bitcoin soared toward $20,000 and would-be miners from the around the world poured into Central Washington, Giga-Watt launched an ambitious expansion: a multimillion-dollar campus of 24 prefabricated “pods” where would-be crypto miners could set up their own cryptocurrency servers. But GigaWatt has struggled to deliver on those ambitions. The crash in cryptocurrency prices since December of 2017 (bitcoin is now trading for around $4,400) has made it difficult to attract investors or hosting clients, Turner said. Read more.
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