Photo/Shetuwang

Apr. 17 (NBD) -- Bitmain, Beijing-based crypto mining hardware manufacturer, released the world's first EtHash ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) miner Antminer E3, showing its intention to grab a piece of the Ethereum market.

According to Bitmain, priced at 800 U.S. dollar, the new product has a hashrate of 180 MH/s and a power consumption of 800W, which has similar performance of a RX570 GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) miner with outstanding overclock and a price of around 2549 U.S. dollars.

The shipping of the batch is expected to start from 17 July this year.

After cryptocurrencies experienced a plunge in value, a number of miner sellers are more likely to take a wait-and-see attitude towards the new product due to uncertainty of the miner market.

An analyst pointed out that possessing low power consumption as well as high cost-effective Ethereum mining capabilities, the new equipment is 2.5 times more efficient than traditional GPU-based miners. 

Before Bitmain's new product release, GPU manufacturers gained a large sum of income from the cryptocurrency platform Ethereum. The release of Antminer E3 is believed to hit the GPU-based miner market.

To boycott the new ASIC miner, Piper Merriam, developer of Ethereum, proposed changing the mining algorithms so as to make the EtHash ASIC miners incompatible with Ethereum network and the proposal was approved by most of the members at the Ethereum core developer meeting held on 6 April.

Bitmain provided no response to Ethereum's proposal as of press time.

Xiao Lei, digital currency analyst, told NBD that Ethereum has taken many measures to disrupt the GPU mining industry, but more new products similar to E3 miner will emerge if the market continues to grow. People will still seek for higher mining efficiency as long as they can gain profits from this market.

The explosively growing value of digital currencies caused great demand for miners, which led to a miracle that Bitmain reportedly made between 3 and 4 billion U.S. dollars in operating profit in 2017, whereas Nvidia, founded 24 years ago, made about 3 billion U.S. dollars during the same period. 

Last year, the operating revenue of Bitmian stood at around 2.5 billion U.S. dollars, according to Micree Zhan, co-founder of Bitmain.

As Bitcoin minners are the main products of the Beijing-based company, Bitmain's hashrate now accounts for half of the total one of the Bitcoin network.

However, miner producers such as Bitmain tend to produce Ethereum miners to reduce risks while making falling profits from Bitcoins caused by the decreasing number of bitcoins to be excavated, exponentially growing hashrate and declining rate of return.

Email: zhanglingxiao@nbd.com.cn