November Obelisk Update

As we noted in June, Sia firmly believes that the best way to protect a cryptocurrency is through ASIC mining, and earlier this year we chose to pursue development of a chip to protect the Sia blockchain.

The blockchain is always our top priority, and we wanted to minimize the time and effort needed to create an ASIC to protect it without sacrificing security. We realized that the Decred cryptocurrency uses a blake256 algorithm for their proof-of-work, which is quite similar to Sia’s blake2b algorithm.

Since there is immense overlap between the effort to make a blake256 chip and a blake2b chip, we realized that we could make both chips at the same time without impacting our shipping deadline or our cost structure.

Thus, earlier this summer and after confirming with the Decred devs that they share our belief in ASICs, we decided to pursue the blake256 chip at the same time we were making the blake2b chip.

We’re excited to announce today that we will be producing a Decred miner, the Obelisk DCR1, which we expect to ship on or before June 30, 2018. Our Decred miners will share similar specifications to the SC1 units:

• $2499
• Less than 500 W
• Less than 65 dB
• About the size of a shoebox
• At least 475 GH/s

We are also excited to announce that after several months of optimization, we are able to confidently say that the Sia miner will get at least 300 GH/s.

Starting now, we will be pre-selling our batch 1 DCR1 units (up to 4,000). The presale will be open until Nov. 24th, and then batch 1 sales for both the DCR1 and the SC1 units will be finished.

Preorder at https://obelisk.tech.

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Originally published at blog.sia.tech on November 3, 2017.