Jack Dorsey’s block takes a big step in the development of the Bitcoin Mining Chip

by James · April 29, 2023

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 mail on 28 April 2023.

The American firm noted that developing bitcoin mining ASICs is a technically and financially challenging task. This led to a high degree of centralization of the supply of Bitcoin mining ASIC, which it considers harmful to miners and the Bitcoin network.

According to the post, the progress made in recent months will allow the block to experiment with design variants and validate their work to provide affordable Bitcoin mining tokens. In addition, the company has purchased a batch of ASIC chips from Intel.

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Intel had earlier in March said that they had done so suspended production of ASIC chips for Bitcoin mining. The tech giant had launched its Blockscale line in April 2022 to boost 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 proprietary mining kits by use of 3-nanometer chips, considered the most advanced chip technology to date.

Block which aims to be a key 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 features of Block’s development is that they are open source. This means that any person or company can use the software and programs to test, update and use them in their own projects.

This is not possible with the leading suppliers of mining equipment on 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 the accessibility of Bitcoin mining. The kit will provide semiconductor chips as the main component of the ASIC chip.

Speaking about the development, Naoise Irwin, Block’s product manager for mining hardware, noted that the chips would serve as the foundation for a complete suite of Bitcoin mining products. In addition, Block’s mining kit will include an industrial Bitcoin mining board designed to be compatible with custom control and third-party controllers such as Raspberry Pi.

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

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