Japanese entertainment giant DMM Group has announced that it will operate a large-scale cryptocurrency mining farm. The company plans to become one of the top three mining farm companies in the world.
DMM, the operator of e-commerce site DMM.com with 27 million members, said on its website last week that it would begin moving toward trials of the scheme next month. Though a firm date wasn’t released for full production, DMM indicated that it would do so by the end of the year if the trials were successful.
DMM’s announcement came one day after Japanese internet conglomerate GMO Internet, Inc. announced its bitcoin mining business plan.
The company states that: “DMM Mining Farm will operate a mass-scale, made-in-Japan quality, mining farm whose operating size will be unmatched by any of the domestic operators. In the future, DMM plans operation that ranks in top three of the world’s mining farm companies in terms of scale.”
“After completion of successful trials in October 2017, ‘DMM Pool’ will be released for world-wide use within the year 2017. During the year 2018, DMM will be one of the 10 largest mining farms in the world,” the company added.
Virtual currencies such as bitcoin and ethereum are expected to be the currencies of the next generation.
In addition, like GMO, the company will also offer “DMM Cloud Mining” for anyone to join. However, unlike GMO which gave details of its mining operations including the production of 7nm chips, DMM did not reveal any details about their mining chips.
DMM Group manages DMM dot com, whose core business areas include online shopping, a rental service, and a video on demand service.
DMM has 27 million members as of June this year, according to the company’s latest data. Its subsidiary DMM dot com Securities is the world’s second largest forex company in terms of trading volume. GMO’s forex subsidiary, GMO Click, is the largest forex broker in the world by volume.
In March 2016, the e-commerce giant started accepting bitcoin payments through Coincheck, a leading Japanese bitcoin exchange and merchant service provider. Using Coincheck’s service, “DMM Points” can be purchased with bitcoin and then exchanged for “contents and services such as video, e-books, online game, VR theater tickets, English tutoring service etc provided by DMM dot com,” the exchange detailed at the time.
DMM, founded in 1999, is led by billionaire Keishi Kameyama and got its start in the pornography business before expanding to a range of e-commerce and digital services. Notably, the company also has a subsidiary that is the second largest forex company in the world by trading volume, according to figures from 2014.
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