Bitmain and Three Billionaires Invest in EOS Launcher Block.one

Chinese chip mining manufacturer Bitmain and hedge fund investors Peter Thiel, Alan Howard and Louis Bacon participated in the latest funding round of Block.one.

EOS launcher Block.one revealed on Monday a new investment round led by Bitmain and three billionaires, Peter Thiel, Alan Howard and Louis Bacon. Block.one did not disclose the sum raised, but noted that it would be used for the new company’s business expansion.

Currently, Block.one is developing the EOSIO blockchain, an open-sourced distributed ledger technology (DLT) for creating decentralized applications.

“Its [EOSIO blockchain] performance and scalability can meet the needs of demanding consumer applications and will pave the way for mainstream blockchain adoption,” Jihan Wu, co-founder of Bitmain said in a statement.

Bitmain is the world’s biggest producer of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chips and was valued at $12 billion in its latest funding round.

The other Block.one investors have experience in backing innovative projects in their early phases. Billionaire Peter Thiel is the co-founder and former CEO of PayPal, and led the company’s move to becoming a publicly traded firm. He also backed Facebook, SpaceX and Airbnb when the projects started. Thiel’s venture firm Founders Fund recently invested in crypto startup Tagomi Systems, which aims to ease virtual trading orders for high-value clients.

Alan Howard and Louis Bacon are hedge fund managers with net worths of more than $1 billion, according to Forbes. Bacon is Moore Capital’s CEO while Howard is co-founder of the Brevan Howard fund.

Block.one’s latest funding round comes several days after major changes in its management team. Last week, the company hired the former HR managing director at Citigroup, James Mendes, as chief people officer, while several days earlier the former CEO of Jefferies Group, Michael Alexander, also joined the company.

Block.one, founded by Brendan Blumer and Daniel Larimer in 2016, is the issuer of the EOS protocol and sells EOS tokens. Michael Novogratz and his Galaxy Digital fund led the previous Block.one investment round.

EOS (EOS) is the fifth largest cryptocurrency, with a market capitalization of more than $7 billion as of the time of publishing.