Jack Dorsey Company Blocks 5nm Bitcoin Mining Chip Design Prototype

JAKARTA - Block, a financial technology and services company owned by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, has announced that it has completed the prototype design of their new five-nanometer (5nm) Bitcoin mining chip. Block claims that the chip is critical to decentralizing the supply of Bitcoin mining equipment.

According to a blog post published on April 28, Block explained that developing a Bitcoin mining ASIC rig is a financial and technical challenge. This causes the "excess concentration of custom bitcoin mining silicon" to be in the hands of several companies. Block states that this centralization is dangerous for miners and Bitcoin networks as a whole.

Interestingly, the San Francisco-based company wrote that it plans to make as many "open source" Bitcoin mining technologies as possible by selling ASIC and its self-developed hardware components to "optimize innovation and maximize the size of the Bitcoin mining hardware ecosystem".

The blog post adds that the steps taken over the past few months will allow companies to experiment with new designs and assist them in bringing more efficient and affordable Bitcoin mining chips to market. To accelerate this development, Block added that they had purchased a large amount of ASIC chips from Intel.

On April 18th, Intel announced that it would stop accepting new orders for their ASIC Blockscale 1000 Series on October 20 and halt shipments in April 2024 as part of a cost-saving measure. Block said the large-scale ASIC capture from Intel would help accelerate the development of their 3nm chip which it claims will be the most advanced chip to date.

"We can now focus on developing state-of-the-art three nanometer ASIC," Intel was quoted as saying by Cointelegraph.

The nanometer scale (1nm) is about the same as the width of two silicon atoms. As parts of the chip get smaller, more and more transistors can be inserted into silicon of the same size. By reducing the overall size, the electric current travels shorter in circuits to carry out calculations, so that overall efficiency increases and the amount of heat generated decreases.

For the record, 5 nanometer ASIS chips have been around for a long time, with the first ASIC 5nm released in 2021 by Chinese mining company Canaan. Currently, most of the ASIC Bitcoin mining uses 5nm chips. However, no company has yet made their ASIC chip designs open source.

The ASIC stands for an "application-specific integrated circuit" and refers to an optimized computer device to complete a single computing function and is usually used to mine cryptocurrencies proof-of-work like Bitcoin.