A New Line of Powerful ASIC Miners Is Coming to Ethereum

A chip designer with extensive experience in developing bitcoin mining devices is turning her sights on the ethereum protocol.

Chen Min, the former chief chip maker at bitcoin mining chip developer Canaan Creative, launched a new venture to build cryptocurrency mining devices called Linzhi. The firm's first project tackles the ethhash algorithm used by ethereum and ethereum classic, with a new line of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) miners set to be released sometime next year.

Dubbed Project Lavasnow, Linzhi's new ethereum miner claims to use 1/8th the amount of electricity as Bitmain's ethash miners, according to a presentation Chen developed for the Ethereum Classic Summit held this week. It also expects to run 1,400 million hashes per second, compared to 190 from one of Bitmain's AntMiners.

The increased hashpower means one of Linzhi's miners should generate roughly $20 per day, compared to a projected $3 from a Bitmain miner. As a result, the company expects customers to break even on the cost of a miner within four months of purchase.

Linzhi did not announce how much each miner would actually cost.

At present, the company is still working on developing the product. Customers may begin receiving their miners in April 2019, according to the presentation.

While many individual miners and members of the ethereum community at present are opposed to ASICs, Chen said in her presentation that hardware alone does not cause centralization.

Rather, "it is the style of the business," she said.

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