“If CoinTerra fails to deliver chips or rigs within 30 days of its promised December delivery window, the company will credit your account 20 percent of the hash power of your order,” the company wrote. “For any undelivered orders, if the company changes the price of TerraMiner systems or GoldStrike1 ASICs before delivery, CoinTerra will re-price all orders and offer either a cash refund or a larger and more valuable hash power credit.”
Unlike BFL, which has no known background in processor design or electrical engineering, Cointerra was founded by a team that appears to have extensive experience in the industry. The company’s CEO, Ravi Iyengar, was Lead CPU Architect at Samsung for two years and worked out of the Samsung Austin Research Center. The head of the company’s advisory board is Naveed Sherwani, an Intel veteran and current chair of the Global Semiconductor Association Technical Steering Committee. Sherwani literally wrote the book on very-large-scale integration (VLSI) semiconductor design and production.
Iyengar, though, was still coy about who his new investors are.
“We have investors who are well-known in the Bitcoin community and also investors who are well-known in the tech world,” he told Ars.
Iyengar went on to say that the Bitcoin world is ripe for a mature manufacturer, noting that his company stood in contrast to others that have been more “hush-hush about their team profiles.”
“I realized that never before has there been an opportunity like this for ASIC architects and designers to participate in something so exciting and at the same time so disruptive,” he added. “It was not about just selling products to consumers any more; this was an opportunity to make a tremendous impact on the financial framework and its ecosystem while still utilizing my years of high-performance, low-power ASIC architecture experience.”