Jack Dorsey’s Block Takes Major Step In Bitcoin Mining Chip Development

Block, a company owned by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, has completed the prototype design of a 5-nanometer high-performance Bitcoin mining ASIC. The company announced this in an update post on April 28, 2023.

The US firm noted that developing bitcoin mining ASICs is a technically and financially challenging task. This led to a high level of centralization of the supply of Bitcoin mining ASIC, which it deems detrimental to miners and the Bitcoin network. 

According to the post, the advances made in the past few months will allow the Block to experiment with design variants and validate their work to provide affordable Bitcoin mining chips. In addition, the company has bought a batch of ASIC chips from Intel. 

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Intel had earlier in March said it had suspended production of ASIC chips for Bitcoin mining. The tech giant had launched its Blockscale line in April 2022 catering to increased 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 fast-track its development of proprietary mining kits using 3-nanometer chips, considered the most advanced chip technology to date. 

Block Aiming To Be A Key Player In The Bitcoin Mining Industry 

Block has an ambitious plan to transform the current Bitcoin mining dynamism with its proprietary chips. One of the unique characteristics of Block’s development is that they are open-sourced. This means that any person or company can utilize its software and programs to test, update and use them in their own projects. 

This is not possible with the leading mining equipment providers in the market today. Block is betting that decentralizing the production of bitcoin mining equipment will benefit the Bitcoin network and ecosystem in the future.

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Earlier in March, Block had revealed that it aims to build a mining development kit to provide a set of tools capable of increasing accessibility to Bitcoin mining. The kit will provide semiconductor chips as the main component of ASIC chip. 

Speaking on the development, Naoise Irwin, Block’s mining hardware product manager, noted that the chips would serve as the foundation for a full suite of Bitcoin mining products. In addition, Block’s mining kit would feature an industry-grade Bitcoin mining board designed to be compatible with custom control and third-party controllers like Raspberry Pi. 

Bitcoin mining has returned to attractive levels due to the resurgence of BTC price since the turn of the year. Many miners have turned on their machines as they look to profit in the bull season.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is up 7% in the past week, trading at $29,300. 

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