Mysterious Bitcoin startup 21 Inc. may be coming to a toaster near you, with a report over the weekend perhaps disclosing clearly for the first time what the company with $121 million in the bank is planning to do.

According to a report from Coinspeak, 21 Inc. is building “new technology that is expected to facilitate worldwide bitcoin adoption and promote bitcoin mining.”

That, of course, could mean anything and everything, but then the details get more interesting:

Under the company’s new business plan, 21 Inc. will insert ASIC chips for bitcoin mining into such daily devices as routers, gaming consoles, USB battery chargers, toasters, set-top boxes, and chipsets.

21 Inc. is said to have partnered with Qualcomm and Intel to work on the development of what’s being described as “split chip” technology for the Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Although not made clear the terminology may suggest the embedding of Bitcoin mining hardware on to existing IoT chips.

The company is also said to be seeking partnerships CISCO, Facebook, and IBM.

Radical distribution plan

A salesman might say “but wait, there’s more” and there most certainly is from this report: 21 Inc. is said to be planning to attract new customers by offering devices for free.

In return for free devices, 21 Inc. will get a revenue share from the Bitcoin mining in each device: 75 percent going to 21 Inc. and the end user receiving the remaining 25 percent.

That’s right: a free toaster with a Bitcoin miner that revenue shares.

While it is easy to joke about the toaster, it goes further as 21 Inc. wants to put the tech into everything including smart LED light bulbs and even smart doorhandles.

Radical might not be the right word, but stranger ideas have worked in the past, although this is right up there with the strangest of them.

As we covered when they took their last round of $116 million back in March, the company still officially remains mysterious (there’s still nothing on their website) and we can’t verify at this time whether all these details are correct, although we will attempt to during the week.

Despite the somewhat odd nature of the proposal, Investors in 21 Inc. include some of the cream of VC from Silicon Valley, so there might be something to the idea; investors include Peter Thiel, Qualcomm Ventures, Data Collective, Khosla Ventures, Yuan Capital, RRE Ventures and others.

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