On December 28, Chinese cryptocurrency news source Odaily reported that changes will soon take place at Bitmain, which is one of the world's leading producers of cryptocurrency mining rigs. They believe that Jihan Wu and the Jenke Group, who are currently co-CEOs of the company, will both retire from their positions. According to the unconfirmed report, unnamed company sources say that Bitmain is right now in the midst of a transition. They also say that employees of the company are not happy with having two CEOs. Odaily further reported that the new CEO will be someone named Wang, but they did not provide further information about this person. In the middle of last month, Chinese media outlets reported that Wu would no longer be involved in important decisions relating to the company. They indicated that he had essentially been demoted to a supervising role. In a related story, Odaily reported that Bitmain will soon end all mining operations and lay off more than 500 employees. According to the report, the company is also already preparing to sell all its Antminer S9s that it uses for its mining operations. Last May, Wu — in an interview with Bloomberg — said that the company was focusing on manufacturing AI chips in response to a crackdown of cryptocurrencies by the Chinese government. At the time, he predicted that these chips would account for 40% of the company's revenues within the next 5 years. However, according to the Odaily report, the company's AI division would suffer layoffs along with the mining division. Other divisions are expected to lay off people as well. These are not first layoffs reported at Bitmain this month. Earlier the company laid off all their BCH developers. Lower cryptocurrency prices this year have affected a number of hardware companies, especially NVidia. Recently, a group of investors filed a class-action lawsuit against the company in response to company losses that came as a result of lower demand for its GPUs, which are used by cryptocurrency miners. The company's stock has lost more than 50% of its value this year largely because of these losses.