Grace Huang Chivers opened her short session at Mining Disrupt Fort Lauderdale 2025, held March 25–27, 2025, by introducing herself as director of global sales at Unionstar, which she described as an investment company and a trading firm. It invests in blockchain and crypto quantitative trading and in mining firms, she said, but mining hardware has always been its key strategic focus.
From GPU trading in Shenzhen
By her account, Unionstar started in 2015 trading GPUs in Shenzhen and built its first mining farm in Sichuan the same year. It moved into hardware trading around 2016. She said the company has since exported more than 1 million machines, built or partnered with six mining farms, and now supports more than 500 mining operations, from the US to Europe and Southeast Asia. Those are the company's own figures; the talk did not break them down.
And today we have exported over 1 million machines, built and partnered with six mining farms.
Grace Huang Chivers · 1:30
Why a miner is priced like a derivative
Her main argument was about price. Unionstar does not see a mining machine only as hardware, she said, but as an investment, and its way of offering clients a good price comes from treating ASIC miners like a derivative. The two co-founders both have a finance background. In her telling, a miner's value moves with four things: the Bitcoin price, network difficulty, electricity costs, and when the next generation of machines comes out.
Our way to deliver the best price, our business, because we treat [ASIC] miners like a derivative.
Grace Huang Chivers · 3:12
For newer readers, the comparison is easy to follow. A derivative is a contract whose value depends on something else. An ASIC miner earns bitcoin, so what a machine is worth rises and falls with the coin's price, with how hard the network is to mine, and with what the power costs. When a more efficient model ships, older units lose value. A buyer who prices only the box can overpay at the wrong point in that cycle.
Tracking prices across manufacturers
She said Unionstar tracks data on ASIC miners from Bitmain, MicroBT, Canaan and others, and checks historical pricing so clients can see the market trend. The pressures she listed were rising electricity costs, declining fees and, at times, regulatory pressure. She also pointed to tariffs and said Unionstar offers DDP service, short for delivered duty paid, in which the seller handles import duties and delivery, so clients can import hardware without the hassle and keep up with changing rules.
Where AI comes in
Near the end she turned to AI. Unionstar uses AI models to forecast pricing trends, she said, to help identify the most efficient deployment strategy, and for what she called smart allocation: suggesting timing to maximize a client's return on investment. She said the company is particularly excited about how AI is transforming mining strategy.
Basically, we use AI model to forecast the pricing trends.
Grace Huang Chivers · 6:21
She also said Unionstar is optimistic about more efficient ASICs and about institutional adoption, naming BlackRock and Fidelity, and she listed cloud mining and stablecoins among the trends she follows.
Then and now
Bitcoin traded at $87,393 on March 25, 2025, the first day of the event. On October 27, 2026 it was $79,621. The talk quoted no machine prices, so its forecasts cannot be checked against later hardware prices. What it offers is a dealer's view of what moves the value of a miner.