Michael Gao isn’t your typical crypto bull, which is evident when looking closer at Fabric Systems, the cryptography hardware tech company he founded that just announced a $13 million funding round.
A serial entrepreneur who says he started trading Bitcoin to try to impress girls at age 15, Gao is now less interested in NFTs and high-flying tokens, and instead has Fabric Systems squarely focused on building infrastructure for real-world blockchain applications.
Gao’s company’s mission is “to change the fabric of society,” he told Fortune.
The $13 million was put up by Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn’s investment firm, Metaplanet, as well as by Blockchain.com and 8090 Partners. Gao intends to direct funds toward developing a Bitcoin miner that he claims will be more environmentally friendly than what’s currently on the market. The miner aims to use immersion cooling, which requires fully submerging the machine in liquid to cool it and enable Bitcoin mining at an increased hash rate.
But building that Bitcoin miner isn’t the company’s main focus. Gao told Fortune that Fabric Systems’ Bitcoin mining operation will help subsidize grander ambitions.
Gao compared Fabric Systems to Nvidia, a technology company that created the first graphics processing units, which laid the groundwork for later advances in rendering graphics and video on computers.
Similarly, Fabric Systems’ accelerator for advanced cryptographic algorithms could provide the infrastructure for real world applications of the blockchain using a technology called zero-knowledge proofs. By proving the validity of a statement without revealing it, zero-knowledge proofs could have broad applications in industries like health care, real estate, and finance, Gao said.
The technology, if built at scale, could let a company verify a person’s medical records without requiring private details, or prove that a person has a high enough credit score to apply for a mortgage without having to hand over a Social Security number, Gao said.
“We think that there’s going to be a community of application developers and all sorts of people to take this hardware and build on top of it,” he said.