CoinLab.

CoinLab was a Bitcoin start-up in Seattle, set up in 2011 by Peter Vessenes, Mike Koss and Tihan Seale, with Vessenes as chief executive. In April 2012 it raised $500,000 from investors including Tim Draper and launched a way for games such as Wurm Online to earn money from their players. A player left CoinLab’s program running on their computer and got in-game items in return; behind the scenes, the program used the computer’s graphics card to mine bitcoin. CoinLab also ran a pool for experienced miners that paid by pay per share: a set amount for each piece of work they sent, whether or not the pool found a block.

mempool.space credits CoinLab with 346 blocks, from 20 May 2012 to 4 October 2013. Most came in the last four months of 2012; in November, its busiest month, it found about one block in 50. Each block’s first transaction paid the whole reward to one address, separate from the transactions confirmed inside the block. Its blocks grew rare in 2013, and no announcement that it stopped mining has been found.

In November 2012 CoinLab agreed with Mt. Gox, then the largest bitcoin exchange, to take over its customers in the US and Canada. The handover never happened, and on 2 May 2013 CoinLab sued Mt. Gox in the federal court in Seattle for breaking the agreement; Bitcoin Magazine put the claim at $75 million. Mt. Gox went bankrupt in February 2014, which paused the US case.

CoinLab took its claim to Mt. Gox’s bankruptcy in Japan. In September 2019 the court there valued it at about ¥1.1 billion with interest, roughly $10 million, and CoinLab appealed to the Tokyo District Court. In August 2026 its lawyers told the US court that the case was still being argued in Tokyo, and that CoinLab had settled its claims against Tibanne, Mt. Gox’s parent company, subject to the approval of the bankruptcy court in Tokyo.