Samson Mow's New Company JAN3 Helps El Salvador Build a Bitcoin City

Former Blockstream chief strategy officer and Pixelmatic founder Samson Mow said Thursday that he has launched a new company called JAN3 that will focus on accelerating bitcoin adoption.

The Chinese-Canadian bitcoin entrepreneur told Reuters that JAN3 has signed a memorandum of understanding to assist in the development of digital infrastructure in El Salvador.

The Chinese-Canadian bitcoin entrepreneur told Reuters that JAN3 had signed a memorandum of understanding to help El Salvador develop its digital infrastructure.

“This is a memorandum that together we will build digital infrastructure for this country and Bitcoin City.”

Mow added that the decision to have JAN3 work with El Salvador was an easy choice, "I just started my company and I said 'do you want to work together?' They said 'of course'."

Mow and his new company will work with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele and his government to help build Bitcoin City, a development that will reportedly use geothermal power from a nearby volcano to power bitcoin mining as well as the city’s infrastructure.

According to its recently established Twitter account, JAN3, which has a rapidly growing 3,300 followers, has reportedly raised $21 million at a valuation of $100 million.

The round was led by Atlanta-based digital currency fund CIO Alistair Milne, crypto mining firm F2Pool co-founder Chun Wang, and El Zonte Capital, a new investment fund founded by prominent bitcoin bull Max Keiser and his wife Stacy Herbert.

The announcement came as Mow spoke at the Bitcoin 2022 conference that two new jurisdictions — the Caribbean island of Roatan and the Portuguese autonomous region of Madeira — will adopt bitcoin as legal tender. . Mow also mentioned Mexico, but that country is still considering the idea.

The name "JAN3" refers to January 3, 2009, the day Bitcoin's pseudonymous founder Satoshi Nakamoto dug up Bitcoin's first block — also known as the "genesis block." With the same name, the company's first tweet was an unambiguous reference to the headline of the day in the New York Times.