Although the cryptocurrency market still looked bleak a couple of weeks ago, bitcoin price rebounded sharply these days, fueling hopes for a full market recovery. Bitcoin bulls may also want to pay closer attention to the miners.

However, the mining industry dose not seem to revitalize in a short time. Under the uncertain market situation, mining giants including Bitmain, Canaan Creative have already prepared for their business transformation.

Taiwan-based chipmaker MediaTek planned to develop its first mining chip named “Kimberly” since the end of last year. However, the project has been temporarily suspended in the past few days.

An industrial insider of Taiwanese supply chain disclosed that, MediaTek adopts the 12nm process in the new mining chip, which was originally planned to be taped out in this July and the mass production was scheduled in the 4th quarter of 2018.

However, due to the steep fall in bitcoin prices and the weakening of market demand, MediaTek temporarily suspended the Kimberly program. MediaTek stated that they won’t comment on a single mining subassembly, but the firm still looking forward to launching new products that related to the mining market.

Obviously, MediaTek uses this initiative to readjustment its production strategy in order to cope with the fluctuations in the bitcoin mining market. Thus, even if the firm restarts its Kimberly plan, we won’t be able to see the mass production of the Kimberly chips until next year.

Although the bitcoin mining market is not so optimistic at present, and it is still unclear which firm ordered the Kimberly chips from MediaTek, developing the blockchain technology behind mining chips is the true intention of MediaTek.

“In recent years, the rise of applications in bitcoin, blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) will drive the ASIC chips expanding the US$10-billion application market space. MediaTek will definitely follow this industry trend,” said by MediaTek’s CTO Kevin Jou.