Barry Silbert clearly sees potential in Seattle-based cloud-mining company HashPlex. The SecondMarket CEO and noted bitcoin evangelist recently joined a seed round investment of $400,000 in the company.
Unlike other cloud-based bitcoin mining systems, however, HashPlex doesn’t sell set amounts of hash power to customers. Instead, the company manages your existing mining equipment for you, reducing the hassle and expense of running a small cryptocurrency mining operation.
It works like this: You send your mining hardware to HashPlex, along with the details of what pool the miner will point at and what wallets it will pay out to. They provide the host computers, passive cooling, internet connections, start/stop/control scripting and any basic maintenance on the hardware.
You pay $99 per kilowatt used each month, with at $10 discount if you use more than 30 kw.
For even a semi-serious miner, those numbers are already looking pretty good. It’s easy to see why Silbert thought the idea was worth investing in. Senior Facebook engineer Jason Prado also contributed to the seed round.
Should HashPlex’s “1MW HashCenter” in central Washington prove successful, the company expects to open other sites in the region. Silbert has hinted that HashPlex may also develop its own “vertically integrated mining pool” for its customers.