Crypto mining firm Hive Blockchain sent a signal to the tech industry when it dropped “blockchain” from its namesake in July, opting to call itself Hive Digital Technologies and reflect its artificial intelligence foray.
The decision is part of a wider movement from crypto miners to pivot outside of digital currency mining, amid depressed crypto prices. January saw crypto mining firm Riot Blockchain rebrand to Riot Platforms while June saw crypto miner Applied Digital announce a $460 million deal to host AI cloud computing in its data center.
Since ETH mining ended in September 2022, $HIVE has been transforming its fleet of 38,000 Nvidia GPUs from miners into cloud infrastructure, marking the next stage of our evolution into a diversified data center operator.
Read the latest HIVE Newsletter: https://t.co/raHqwMMalv pic.twitter.com/tHkVuLMtyT
— HIVE Digital Technologies (@HIVEDigitalTech) August 17, 2023
Speaking to Cointelegraph, Hive Digital Technologies CEO Aydin Kilic and Chairman Frank Holmes reiterated the company is still heavily involved in Bitcoin and crypto mining — despite the name change.
However, they now see two nascent sectors — blockchain and AI — as being almost symbiotic when it comes to Web3 development, with Kilic stating:
“Blockchain and AI can certainly co-exist — they’re both pillars of Web3.”
Pointing to the key differences between Web2 and Web3, Kilic suggests that AI will be used to upgrade the user experience of Web3 over time.
“AI allows Web3 to be more adaptive. In Web2 you have all this metadata but you lose your privacy because all of the big Internet companies are secretly harvesting all this data for their profit,” said Kilic.
“With blockchain, you have all this privacy and can own your own data. But without that metadata, how will you have a curated web experience? So that’s where the AI comes in to make it more adaptive and intuitive. It all works together,” he explained.
“Where AI will play a role, is where Metaverses and DAOs will play a role. All of Web3 is still in the early innings.”
“Where these pillars of technology actually get applied in novel ways that are broadly adopted is yet to be seen,” he added.
Ethereum taught valuable lessons
Hive Digital Technologies was the first ever publicly traded crypto mining company, building out its first Bitcoin mining center in 2014 and going public three years later in 2017.
Holmes attributed much of the company’s ability to jump into new…
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