After resigning as Twitter CEO in 2021 and handing over to Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey shifted his focus toward building Block which is a friendly financial services company for Web 3.
Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, has been a public vocal advocate of Bitcoin for several years now. He has publicly stated that he believes Bitcoin has the potential to become the currency of the internet. Jack Dorsey’s company Square has made significant investments in Bitcoin. In October 2020, Square announced that it had purchased $50 million worth of Bitcoin, representing about 1% of the company’s total assets at the time. Square has also launched a Bitcoin wallet and trading platform called Cash App, which has been very popular with retail investors.
According to a new update from the company, the Bitcoin mining chip that Dorsey’s Block has been working on has entered the prototype stage. The former Twitter CEO is working to decentralize Bitcoin mining and remove it from the hands of a few established players. This chip, designed by Block, will make Bitcoin mining more accessible to individual miners as well as emerging crypto-mining firms.
Dorsey’s prototype features a new five-nanometer (5nm) Bitcoin mining chip. Dorsey’s initial focus on this project was to create custom silicon that is required for Bitcoin mining, and he is on track to release this chip soon.
“We plan to make our Bitcoin mining technology open source where we can. We intend to make it possible for third parties to use our hardware and software solutions for their own further development, by selling standalone application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) and hardware components and providing extensive support and reference resources. We seek to optimize for innovation and maximize the size of the Bitcoin mining hardware ecosystem,” said an official blog post from Block.
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The initial design of the Bitcoin mining chip was created by a team of ASIC designers. The team behind this chip has dubbed it ‘a milestone development’ now that it has entered the prototype stage.
“This is an exciting milestone that will allow us to experiment with design variants, validate our design work, and calibrate our testing on real silicon. We expect to receive the prototypes back this fall. They will be a valuable input into our three nanometer ASIC development work,” Block’s post added.
Mining Bitcoin has become more difficult in recent years, as more advanced computers operated by mining companies and independent miners have entered the system.
To mine a Bitcoin, miners must solve complex algorithms on powerful computers. Bitcoin mining chips were created to make the otherwise energy-intensive process more energy-efficient.
Dorsey’s Block is one of several tech companies that are now dabbling in the creation of Bitcoin mining chips in order to reduce the high level of centralized supply of Bitcoin mining ASICs, which has been deemed detrimental to Bitcoin miners as well as the network resiliency of the Bitcoin blockchain.
In June of last year, Samsung began testing of its three nanometre (nm) foundry processing chip, which would be capable of facilitating Bitcoin mining.
According to Bitcoin Magazine, US-based chipmaker Qualcomm is also interested in using Samsung’s ASIC chips.
