KnCMiner.

KnCMiner was a Swedish company, founded in Stockholm in 2013 by Sam Cole, Andreas Kennemar, Marcus Erlandsson and Michael Unnebäck as a joint venture of a chip-design firm and a financial-technology consultancy. It made bitcoin mining machines, starting with the Jupiter in 2013, and raised $32 million from investors including Accel and Creandum. It also ran mines of its own. The main one, near the Arctic Circle, was in hangars on a former military helicopter base at Boden, in northern Sweden, and ran on hydroelectric power.

mempool.space credits it with 6,290 blocks, from 14 May 2014 to 12 September 2016, each carrying the name KnCMiner. In 2015, its busiest year, it found about 6% of all blocks, and 9% in its busiest week, in September 2015. From September 2014 it sold cloud mining from its mines: customers bought a share of the mining for six months and were paid from its Clear Sky Pool by pay per share, a set amount for each piece of work, whether or not a block was found. Each block’s first transaction paid the reward, or nearly all of it, to a KnCMiner address, and KnCMiner paid its customers separately. That reward is separate from the transactions confirmed inside the block.

On 27 May 2016 KnCMiner’s parent company declared bankruptcy. Its chief executive, Sam Cole, said that after the halving due that July, which would cut the new bitcoin in each block from 25 to 12.5, each coin would cost KnCMiner more to mine than its market price of about $480. A receiver, Nils Åberg, took control and aimed to keep the business going. In August KnCMiner was sold to GoGreenLight, a Swedish company set up for the purchase as a sister company of the IT and telecoms firm Borderlight, which said it would keep running KnCMiner’s mines and data centres. KnCMiner’s last block came on 12 September 2016; from the next day, mempool.space credits blocks to GoGreenLight instead.