Bitmain Technologies Limited is a privately-owned Chinese company, founded by Jihan Wu and Micree Zhan. Bitmain is also an operator of Antpool, one of the largest Bitcoin mining pools. Bitmain has offices in China, the US, Israel, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Bitmain was originally established to develop an ASIC chip capable of mining Bitcoin, but soon became an investor in mining software developer as well. The company is now working on creating chips for artificial intelligence. Bitmain Ltc., is a very successful company, with around $3.5 billion in profit generated in 2017. Bitmain is considered to be one of the most influential companies in the cryptocurrency industry by generating high-grade Bitcoin mining hardware, having huge mining capabilities and because of their technological advances. Bitmain has been criticized for centralizing the Bitcoin network and its monopolistic position in mining products with Bitmain’s Antminer S9 and Antminer T9+.