“Shenma chose to stand with ASICBOOST back then, but I did not expect to be the first to be sued by ASICBOOST in the end.
On November 30, Wu said that the blockchain exclusively disclosed that Yibang announced that it had obtained the exclusive right to use the ASICBOOST Korean patent from the patentee Circle Line International. The ASICBOOST patentee has sued Samsung in South Korea for patent infringement. Go to court, demanding that Samsung stop supplying chips for Shenma, and demand huge compensation and destroy the products it has manufactured. At present, the lawsuit is still in the stage of court acceptance, and the future outcome is unpredictable.
ASICBOOST is a SHA256 calculation optimization algorithm jointly developed by cryptographers Timo Hanke and Sergio Lerner. By optimizing the module structure of the block header structure in SHA256 calculation, ASICBOOST can theoretically increase the efficiency of SHA256 calculation by 20%-30%. For Bitcoin mining activities that rely heavily on SHA256 calculation efficiency, ASICBOOST will undoubtedly bring Not a small improvement in performance.
Due to the huge application value of this technology in the Bitcoin mining field, in 2014, the inventors Dr. Timo Hanke and Sergio Lerner chose to submit applications in the United States, Europe, China, and South Korea, seeking to protect the technology as a patent. However, this move immediately attracted strong criticism from the Bitcoin community. Many people worried that once the technology was applied for a patent, the Bitcoin computing power would be monopolized by a few ASICBOOST miners, and the ASICBOOST technology was in the hands of the patentee. This leads to the centralization of Bitcoin mining activities.
In May 2017, the ASICBOOST patent application fell into the hands of a company called Little Dragon Technology after several changes of hands. At the time when the mining machine giant Bitmain was in full swing, the Bitmain threat theory had a good market in Amber. Many people worried that Bitmain’s monopoly on mining machines would threaten the decentralization of Bitcoin.
Xiaolong Technology saw the right time and first issued an open lawyer’s letter through the GeTech law firm in the United States, without naming names accusing “certain Bitcoin chip and mining machine manufacturers” for intentional patent infringement. Subsequently, several mining machine manufacturers including Shenzhen Microbt, Halong Mining, and Bitfury formed a patent alliance called Blockchain Defensive Patent License (BDPL), claiming to establish a patent open source standard in the blockchain field. All BDPL members are free to use the patents of members of the organization, which naturally also includes the ASICBOOST patent that is still pending.
At that time, many people thought that the series of actions by Xiaolong Technology meant that Bitmain was very strong. Because Bitmain has a huge patent library after years of technology accumulation, it is unlikely that Bitmain will choose to open source its patents like the newly established Shenma, and share its technological achievements with other competitors. Therefore, once the AB patent is granted, Bitmain will inevitably face a huge patent fee claim from Xiaolong Technology. Xiaolong eliminated the long-standing suspicion and hostility of the Bitcoin community towards ASICBOOST technology by making ASICBOOST technology “free and open source”.
However, after entering 2018, the whole Amber fell into a bear market, and the sales of mining machines were not as good as before. ASICBOOST is also unfavorable for the past few years, and suffered major setbacks in patent applications in China and the United States. First, in August 2018, the State Intellectual Property Office of China formally rejected the ASICBOOST Chinese patent application, and determined that the patent only involved “pure mathematical calculation methods and did not use technical solutions” and “substantially did not solve any technical problems.” Meet the authorization requirements of Article 2 of the Chinese Patent Law. Prior to this, Bitmain applied for a similar patent in China and has not yet been authorized. No one company in China holds this patent.
Then in September 2018, the U.S. Patent Office also rejected ASICBOOST on the grounds that the object claimed by the patent was an “abstract concept” (algorithm), which did not meet the patentable technical requirements of Article 101 of the U.S. Patent Act. Patent application in the United States.
At the end of 2018, the ownership of the ASICBOOST patent was quietly changed again. Among them, the patent applications from the United States, Europe, and South Korea were transferred to a mysterious BVI company named “Top Galore Limited”, while the Chinese patent applications fell to natural persons. The hand of “Yang Jie”. It is worth noting that after the change of the ownership of the patent application in China, the name of Xindong first appeared on the payment information page of the patent in the database of the Chinese Intellectual Property Office.
After this change, ASICBOOST faded out of people’s sight for a while and gradually fell into silence. In 2018, Bitmain also announced the release of firmware supporting ASICBOOST. Other manufacturers followed up. For a while, people seemed to have forgotten the threat from the ASICBOOST patent.
However, changes have emerged again. As the cryptocurrency market gradually picks up in 2020, the ASICBOOST patent has also quietly completed its return inadvertently. In April 2020, the European Patent Office finally gave the green light to ASICBOOST’s European application and agreed to grant the patent right of the application; in June 2020, the Korean Patent Office followed suit and made the authorization decision. So far, ASICBOOST has obtained patent rights in Europe and South Korea. Especially in South Korea, the patent right can be said to occupy the strategic point of mining machine production in one fell swoop.
As we all know, due to the tight 7nm production capacity of TSMC in the past two years, major mining machine manufacturers have sought to cooperate with Samsung, choosing to invest in the production of mining machine chips at Samsung’s fab in South Korea. The M20/M30 series sold by Shenma is Samsung 8nm chip. The ASICBOOST patent is authorized in South Korea, which will undoubtedly affect it. Once the ASICBOOST patentee wins the lawsuit in South Korea, it will mean that Samsung chip mining machine manufacturers other than Yibang will lose the help of ASICBOOST, thereby losing more than 20% of the mining performance. For mines that rely heavily on South Korean fabs The machine manufacturer is undoubtedly a major blow.
What is interesting is that Shenma chose to stand with ASICBOOST back then, but after his rise, he was the first to be sued by ASICBOOST . However, at present, many parties should be in close consultations. It is highly likely that they will talk while talking. After all, the patentee and Ebond are only asking for money rather than attacking Shenma. Ebond itself no longer focuses on the mining machine business but transforms the exchange. .
Professional lawyers pointed out that the patent protection period is calculated from the patent application date, which is 2014, so it has retrospective effect on the products before Shenma. However, the situation of patent compensation is different in different countries. The amount of domestic patent compensation is often not high. The lethality is usually an injunction. The domestic court generally issues an injunction to the losing party, which means that the infringing product can be produced or sold. On the contrary in the United States, courts generally do not issue injunctions, but the amount of patent compensation is often very high. South Korea is also a civil law country, so it is similar to China. (The head picture is from eastshore.xyz)
This article is assisted by patent lawyer Dongbing. If you need patent-related business consulting services, please contact Wu Shuo for blockchain docking.
