Genesis Mining

Data Center Systems Engineer

2014 – 2018

Genesis Mining, founded in 2013 and registered in Hong Kong, pioneered cloud mining as the first company to sell hashrate as a service: customers bought hashpower contracts for Bitcoin, Ether and other cryptocurrencies, and Genesis built and ran the data centers behind them. It grew to more than 2 million customers worldwide and into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. It ran mining data centers on four continents, in Iceland, Sweden, Bosnia, Russia (including Siberia), Abkhazia, Kazakhstan, China, Venezuela, Argentina, Canada and the United States (Washington State). Its flagship sites were on Iceland's Reykjanes peninsula, where geothermal power and a cold climate allowed large GPU and ASIC farms with free-air cooling, among them Enigma, opened in 2016 as one of the largest Ether mining farms in the world. In 2017 CNBC called Genesis the world's largest cloud-based blockchain and cryptocurrency mining company.

Genesis Mining was the first to industrialize Ethereum mining and grew into the largest Ethereum miner in the world, pioneering Bitcoin and Ethereum mining at industrial scale. There was no playbook to follow: this hardware had little in common with a conventional data center, where servers rarely run near capacity. Mining machines run flat out, at 100%, around the clock, and the craft was drawing every last hash out of them without destroying the equipment. Only a handful of people in the world knew how to do it. As a data center systems engineer, Chris deployed, tuned and kept thousands of mining systems running: GPU rigs mining Ether on Ethash and SHA-256 ASICs mining Bitcoin. He led systems optimization across the fleet, working closely with the in-house development team on custom VBIOS profiles that balanced power draw, hashrate and efficiency against hashprice, and he managed thermal performance in the data halls, finding and correcting hot spots and airflow problems as capacity grew. He also worked closely with the development and engineering team to perfect the monitoring and management system that kept every system visible around the clock, and planned the deployment of new capacity. The Iceland operation drew wide coverage, including CNBC, CBS's 60 Minutes, a WIRED photo gallery of the Enigma farm and a VICE on HBO segment on the company.