Crypto mining giant Bitmain acquires bitcoin cash browser wallet Telescope

Crypto mining giant Bitmain has acquired Telescope, a bitcoin cash browser wallet, CoinDesk reported.

Launched earlier this year, Telescope aimed to facilitate instant bitcoin cash transactions. The wallet can currently operate on Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox and has plans to expand to other platforms following the acquisition.

According to the details on GitHub, Telescope is supported by BitPay and moneybutton.com. It stores cryptographic keys in the browser itself, meaning that transactions are signed directly by the user’s browser.

“The private key will only leave the browser to be synced with other Chrome/Firefox browsers that you are signed into. Encrypting the private key ensures that nobody will know the private key without the password, not even this extension,” it added.

Commenting on the acquisition, Nishant Sharma, head of international press relations and communications at Bitmain, said:

"Browser-embedded cryptocurrency wallets are a promising technology. The Telescope development team is doing some very interesting work and we look forward to working together with them on the Telescope project and future bitcoin cash projects."

Bitmain has faced some controversy as it holds around 6 percent of the total bitcoin cash, which devalued amid weakness in the cryptocurrency market for most of 2018.

The company confirmed late last month that it was it was bringing its initial public offering (IPO) to Hong Kong. According to the IPO filing, Bitmain earned $2.25 billion in revenue in 2017 from mining hardware sales and brought in $2.68 billion in sales during the first half of 2018, Forbes reported.