China's 2021 mining ban forced ASIC distributors like Bitmars to pivot completely to selling hardware to North American markets.
Bitmars CEO Summer Meng says most Chinese mining employees refused Bitcoin or USDT salaries, preferring the Yuan due to government stigma.
Meng claims state-run media in China depicts Bitcoin almost exclusively as a vehicle for scams, creating deep cultural reluctance.
Manufacturers like Bitmain often list hardware as 'out of stock' publicly, forcing miners to go through secondary distributors for access.
Distributors secure priority hardware allocations from manufacturers, making them critical gatekeepers for the latest ASIC generations.
This distribution model insulates manufacturers from the operational risk of dealing with thousands of individual retail buyers.
European investors still buy hardware but ship it to regions with cheaper energy, as mining follows power costs, not buyer location.
Opnet runs smart contracts directly on Bitcoin L1 using a custom WASM virtual machine, not the EVM.
The protocol uses native Bitcoin for gas, eliminating the need for wrapped assets or bridging.
Danny says users only ever make Bitcoin transactions from their Bitcoin wallet to interact with DApps.
Opnet's WASM VM supports TypeScript and Rust smart contracts, prioritizing developer experience over EVM compatibility.
Chad states the entire network state is recreatable from 100% on-chain data, ensuring deterministic consensus.
The protocol avoids OP_RETURN and uses the witness field, maintaining compatibility across Legacy, SegWit, and Taproot addresses.
Opnet scales at Bitcoin's speed, bound by block times and L1 throughput, targeting institutional DeFi over high-frequency trading.
The goal is to move beyond speculative NFTs to functional financial tools, capturing idle liquidity in cold storage.