Bitmain’s board of directors has removed Micree Zhan from all corporate roles.
This is what can be read in a tweet from Blockstream’s CSO, Samson Mow, who shares two images in Chinese that would confirm what happened.
In fact, the removal would have happened as early as last year, on October 28th, 2019, and now the company is threatening legal action against Zhan if he continues to interfere with the company’s business.
Micree Zhan, co-founder of Bitmain, is also the richest crypto entrepreneur in 2019 with 3.2 billion in assets that puts him in 616th place among the richest men on the planet.
The announcement was made directly on the company’s Weibo page, where it is confirmed that on November 5th, the company approved the executive director’s decision to remove Zhan from management.
In addition, it reveals that Zhan, although he no longer has the right to act as the company’s legal representative or to send communications or instructions to the company’s employees, is not complying with the decision of the shareholders, who have authorized legal action against him.
The company has also instructed all executives and employees to ignore any request from him, threatening with legal action even those who do not comply with this order.
Zhan in turn took two legal actions against the company to regain his position, partly because he still seems to have the confidence of many employees.
Initially, Micree Zhan owned twice as many shares as the other co-founder Jihan Wu, but his share seems to have decreased significantly over time.
Therefore, the company was previously de facto controlled by him, but this is no longer the case.
It has to be said that Bitmain has not been going through a flourishing period for some time, and the production standstill of its factories, due to the coronavirus epidemic in China, has certainly not helped an already problematic situation.
In particular, it has begun to suffer from competition from MicroBT, a Shenzhen-based company that manufactures and sells high-performance mining machines.
Bitmain had to study a reorganization plan that would cut its workforce by 50%, and although its market share would still be dominant (about 65%), it now seems to be declining.
