Block, a company owned by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, has completed a prototype design for a high-performance 5nm Bitcoin mining ASIC. The company announced this in an update mail On April 28, 2023.
The US company noted that developing ASICs for bitcoin mining is a challenging task both technically and financially. This has led to ASIC’s high level of centralization of the bitcoin mining supply, which ASIC considers harmful to miners and the bitcoin network.
According to the post, the progress made in the past few months will allow Block to experiment with design variants and validate their work to provide affordable Bitcoin mining chips. In addition, the company purchased a batch of ASIC chips from Intel.
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Intel earlier in March said it had done so hanging Production of ASIC chips for Bitcoin mining. The tech giant launched its Blockscale line in April 2022 to cater to the growing demand for Bitcoin mining. However, it appears to be taking a new direction and will stop taking orders for Blockscale chips by October 20, 2023, and end production by April 2024. Block intends to take advantage of this to accelerate the development of its mining pools using 3-nm chips, considered the most advanced chip technology to date. now.
The block aims to be a major player in the bitcoin mining industry
Block has an ambitious plan to transform the current bitcoin mining dynamic with its proprietary chips. One of the unique characteristics of Block development is that it is open source. This means that any person or company can use its software and software to test it, update it, and use it in their own projects.
This is not possible with the leading mining equipment providers in the market today. Block is betting that decentralizing production of bitcoin mining equipment will benefit the Bitcoin network and ecosystem in the future.
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Earlier in March, Block open They aim to build a mining development kit to provide a suite of tools capable of increasing the accessibility of bitcoin mining. The group will provide semiconductor chips as the main component of the ASIC chip.
Speaking about the development, Naoise Irwin, Product Manager for Block Mining Hardware, noted that the chips will serve as the foundation for an entire suite of bitcoin mining products. In addition, the Block’s mining suite will feature an industry-class Bitcoin mining board designed to be compatible with custom controllers and third-party consoles such as the Raspberry Pi.
Bitcoin mining has returned to attractive levels due to the bitcoin price rally since the beginning of the year. Many miners have turned on their machines as they look to profit in bull season.
At the time of writing, bitcoin is up 7% in the past week, trading at $29,300.
Featured image, chart from TradingView