The first ASIC shipment
Canaan's annual report on Form 20-F states the origin as a date rather than a story: "On January 19, 2013, Mr. Nangeng Zhang, our chairman and chief executive officer, and his team, shipped the world's first batch of mining machines incorporating ASIC technology to consumers in Bitcoin's history under the brand name, Avalon." Before that, bitcoin was mined on general-purpose processors and graphics cards. An application-specific integrated circuit does one thing, computes SHA-256 hashes, and does it at an efficiency general hardware cannot approach, which is why the whole industry moved within about two years and why home mining largely ended.
The corporate structure came later. A Chinese operating company was incorporated and
renamed Hangzhou Canaan Intelligence Information Technology Co., Ltd. in September 2015.
In February 2018 Canaan Cayman Holdings Ltd. was incorporated in the Cayman Islands and
renamed Canaan Inc. that April. No filing this directory could open gives an incorporation
year for the original Chinese entity, so the founded field is left off rather than
guessed at.
Listed, and loss-making
Canaan completed its initial public offering on the Nasdaq Global Market on 21 November 2019, selling 10,000,000 American depositary shares at $9.00 for gross proceeds of $90 million. It files as a foreign private issuer, which means an annual report on Form 20-F rather than a 10-K, and headquarters have since moved to Singapore.
The 20-F for 2025, filed 15 April 2026, reports revenue of US$529.7 million, up from US$269.3 million in 2024, and a net loss of US$210.3 million. Machine sales are still the larger half, but the company has been mining for its own account as well: mining income rose from US$44.0 million in 2024 to US$113.2 million in 2025. Canaan also launched an Avalon Home line of small, quieter machines aimed at individuals in 2024 and began selling them in 2025, which is an attempt to sell back into the market its own chips helped close. Listing here is not endorsement.