The Research Center for Digital Financial Asset of Tsinghua SEC (School of Economics and Management) was recently unveiled. It was established with donation from Chinese bitcoin mining giant Bitmain.

Based at China’s top university, the research center aims to initiate academic research in the emerging field of digital financial asset and build a world-leading research platform for the healthy development and system design of digital financial asset by integrating the world’s top industrial and academic resources.

As a world leading chip designer, Bitmain has been in close relation with world-class universities including Tsinghua University. Since 2016, it has sponsored the Tsinghua supercomputing team which won the championship in the 2018 International Supercomputing Conference.

Bitmain is the global leader in the manufacturing of cryptocurrency mining equipment and controls the top two mining pools BTC.com and Antpool. In addition to mining, the application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) produced by Bitmain can be used in other fields requiring complex computing, such as machine learning and AI.

Headquartered in Beijing, Bitmain has branched its offices out of China to US, Israel, Netherlands and Switzerland. The company is reportedly planning to expand its research and development center in Israel, tripling the number of employees in the country from the current 15.

“There has been a huge momentum at Bitmain in the past year, arising from the growing adoption of blockchain technology in general and digital currencies in particular,” Bitmain VP and manager of its Israel operations Glikberg said, “despite the lull after the great cryptocurrency hype at the end of last year, the industry is seeing opportunities to grow and build.”

Bitmain is indeed moving fast forward in the boom of emerging technologies – blockchain and artificial intelligence, two technologies of today. It is ranked 13^th with a rough valuation of RMB70 billion in the Hurun Greater China Unicorn Index 2018 Q2 freshly released today. Prior to that, the company has reportedly closed a Series B round funding with a valuation of $12 billion.