Bitfury Clarke. Measured by success

Bitfury, a blockchain company of about 700 people in 15 countries, designs its own mining chips. Its new chip was built on 14 nm while rivals moved to 7 nm, and buyers compared chips by nanometres. Bitfury wanted them to judge by performance and return on investment, but telling people a spec doesn't matter rarely works: nobody likes a new yardstick pushed on them.

First the chip needed a name. Mining had a gold-rush image; Bitfury wanted to talk about the future. So we named its hardware after the people who imagined it: chips after science-fiction writers, controller chips after starship captains, mining machines after sci-fi spaceships. The chip became Bitfury Clarke, and the first letter of each name marks where a chip sits in the line.

For the launch we borrowed a rule people already live by: we stopped judging employees by their looks, age or size long ago. Why does the most advanced industry in the world still judge chips by size?

In the film, directed by Petr Storozhenko with Electric Sheep Film, a judge in a wig is fired, a grandma plays a DJ set and a giraffe in a headset works at a computer. Clarke is the next hire.

Bitfury launched Bitfury Clarke with the film in September 2018, in English, Chinese and Japanese, and took it where chips get sold: industry trade shows and one-to-one meetings with buyers, the rooms where the nanometre question comes first. A month later the mining machine built on Clarke came out as Bitfury Tardis, a name from our spaceship shortlist.

Losing on the one spec your buyers know? Tell us what they should judge you by.