Jack Dorsey’s Block Takes Major Step In Bitcoin Mining Chip Development

Block, a company owned by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, has completed the prototype design of a 5-nanometer highperformance Bitcoin mining ASIC. The company announced this in an update post on April 28, 2023.

The US firm noted that developing bitcoin mining ASICs is a technically and financially chal- lenging task. This led to a high level of centralization of the supply of Bitcoin mining ASIC, which it deems detrimental to miners and the Bitcoin network.

According to the post, the advances made in the past few months will allow the Block to experiment with design variants and validate their work to provide affordable Bitcoin mining chips. In addition, the company has bought a batch of ASIC chips from Intel.

When asked whether such a bill could be signed by President Joe Biden in the next 12 months, McHenry told a crowd at CoinDesk's Consensus 2023 event, "yes." The key lawmaker was quick to provide a rider that it's always a challenge to legislate something new into existence.

"What we plan to do over the next two months is report a deal out," McHenry said. He added that the bill will address both securities and commodities regimes and issues that are hard to fix on either side.

Intel had earlier in March said it had suspended production of ASIC chips for Bitcoin mining. The tech giant had launched its Blockscale line in April 2022 catering to increased demand for Bitcoin mining. However, it appears to be taking a new direc- tion 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 fast-track its development of proprietary mining kits using 3-nanometer chips, considered the most advanced chip technology to date.