A professional marketing guy? No, I’m not that kind of professional.
But you are some sort of an insider, with access to the information about the most current tools and processes. Why don't you use to produce some useful information, even if you don't have funding for the fully separate mask set production?
Why don't you actually run some representative simulations, even some reduced-rounds non-compatible version of SHA-256?
Why can't you squeeze a single Bitcoin mining engine into paid-for but left unused free space on some unrelated project taping out? The same way that Heveticoin did, and in the spirit of the long history of placing various more-or-less useable Easter Eggs into established silicon products?
It would even be possible to do a complete power shut-off of the unused backup logic in ASICboost mode, to avoid the leakage of these logic parts. But it still consumes silicon area, which increases your production costs in terms of $/GH.
Halong has chosen a very aggressive way to implement ASICboost without any backup logic for a non-ASICboost mode. In this way they have enabled the full potential of ASICboost in terms of J/GH and $/GH.
Can you make an educated speculation as to what would be the underlying business strategy?
What is the technical merit of multiplying the complexity of the engine several times in exchange for the gains lower than the regular manufacturing tolerances?
Lots of ASICs get designed purely for non-technical reasons: copy protection, hiding of patent or license violation in a way that is extremely hard to reverse-engineer and litigate, etc.
I think there should be some constructive speculation that you could post without violating your NDAs, don't you think? Or maybe everyone at your company already knows that HyperMega is a pseudonym of their 1st VP of Sales, and everyone there already watches your back?