digitalBTC.

digitalBTC was an Australian company, based in Perth and led by the entrepreneur Zhenya Tsvetnenko, that mined bitcoin with its own machines. In 2014 it became the first bitcoin company listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, through the reverse takeover of Macro Energy, a listed company that took the name Digital CC Limited. Its machines came from BitFury and later Spondoolies-Tech, and from August 2014 many ran at Verne Global’s data centre in Iceland, which is powered by renewable energy.

It wasn’t a pool that others joined. Each of its blocks paid the whole reward to one of its own addresses in the block’s first transaction: that was the company’s own income from mining, separate from the transactions confirmed inside the block. In its first two months of mining, in 2014, it produced roughly 3% of all new bitcoins, CoinDesk estimated. mempool.space credits digitalBTC with 676 blocks, from 3 May 2014 to 4 May 2015, and 116 more, from April to August 2015, to digitalX Mintsy, the platform for leasing mining power that digitalBTC launched in March 2015.

As the price of bitcoin fell, digitalBTC turned to other products. On 29 September 2015 Tsvetnenko told The Sydney Morning Herald that the company, which was losing money, had been “slowly winding down our bitcoin mining operations” and would concentrate on AirPocket, an app for sending money abroad. A month later Digital CC took the name Digital X, Cointelegraph reported.