Bitmain Will Release New Ethereum ASIC Miner Despite Upcoming Merge

Bitmain is the largest Bitcoin miner manufacturer and supplies the popular product line: Antminers. Antminers are Bitcoin ASIC’s (application-specific integrated circuit), built with the singular purpose to mine BTC. The product line ranges from $3,000 to $20,000 for their latest 19 lineup. They even recently started selling the Antspace, a shipping container outfitted to be a hydro Antminer container.

For the past few years, while industrial BTC mining became more prominent in larger institutions, the mining difficulty for BTC became so difficult that it was impossible for individuals to do so without investing in multiple ASIC miners.

Ethereum is still able to be mined by individuals through ordinary graphics processing units (GPUs). This caused GPU prices to skyrocket with scalpers. Over the past 4 years, GPU’s were being sold for over twice their Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price (MSRP). With Ethereum’s upcoming transition to Proof-of-stake, dubbed “The Merge”, ETH will no longer be mined but powered through users staking the coin instead. This will cripple most of the current ETH mining operations, as miners will be forced to either abandon their setups or start mining a different alt coin. For individual miners, ETH mining has been the go to choice to maximize profitability without having to invest too much for initial set up.

While Bitmain mainly focuses on Bitcoin miners, they did release the Antminer E3 in 2018, an Ethereum mining rig. The upcoming model will be named Antminer E9. The model uses the Ethash algorithm and can mine Ethereum or Ethereum Classic and is priced at $9,999. The device has a hashrate of 2400 MH/s (Megahash per second), which is equivalent to around 25 Nvidia GeForce 3080 GPUs. The MSRP for 3080’s range from $699 to around $800 depending on the model and brand.