The Geniuses at Work Corporation (GAW) announced in a statement Wednesday that the company had acquired a controlling stake in cloud mining company ZenMiner.

GAW’s US$8 million-dollar investment brings on board technology that could help develop its “Project Prime,” a next-generation Bitcoin platform that the company intends to launch later this year.

“We're investing heavily into bringing Bitcoin to the masses," GAW’s CEO, Josh Garza, said. "We’ve been impressed with how rapidly ZenMiner took over the hosted mining market. After we saw their technology, we knew we had to bring them in."

- Josh Garza, CEO at GAW Miners

GAW — a corporation that dabble in everything from mining to providing internet service to providing telephony services — already made headlines earlier this month by scooping up the URL BTC.com for US$1.1 million.

The company is moving quickly into the cloud mining space after finding success as a hardware vendor.

“GAW Miners was born after someone ripped me off during an ASIC purchase,” Garza told TechCrunch last week. “I already owned the successful GAW.com, and decided to quickly launched GAW Miners in March 2014 to sell ASICs with fast shipping, reasonable prices, and compensation for any delays or downtime. The company was an overnight success and achieved over $10M in sales during its first month and is on schedule to do $100M in this first year.”

ZenMiner’s former president (and now head of GAW’s new ZenMiner division) Eric Capuano said he was “thrilled” to have GAW’s resources behind him now.

“GAW can pump far more resources into ZenMiner’s R&D than we could ever dream of alone,” Capuano said. “With their support, we can add game-changing features like hardware trading, instant activation, and cutting-edge pools to our customers even faster.”

This might be crucial for ZenMiner’s survival, according to what Garza told TechCrunch. He said mining is soon going to be an industry in which only the biggest players prevail.

"Soon, you’ll have to buy (or buy into) large hyper-efficient ASIC units run in data centers where electric costs are cheapest."

 “Mining is following the same path the internet took. At first, the world wide web existed mostly in desktop units people ran in their basements. Now, the internet is mainly housed in servers that are run in massive data centers where management, storage and electricity costs are low. It’s simply uneconomical to run a server at home anymore. The same is happening here.”

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