It has just come to light that Samsung is designing and manufacturing chips for mining the leading cryptocurrency, Bitcoin.

Last month, at the MicroBT M20 conference in China, the general manager for Samsung Foundries China revealed that the company had been designing and 2nm and 5nm chips for Bitcoin mining.

Bitcoin Mining & Samsung

According to some internal documents from the firm, Samsung has been fabricating these mining chips since the first quarter of last year! Samsung has publicly announced its strategic partnership with MicroBT, the third biggest designer of Bitcoin ASICs behind Bitmain and Canaan during the conference held in Chengdu, China.

So even though, it is lagging behind two big competitors, MicroBT is well-known in the space for its performance of power efficiency of its chip designs, according to sources in the industry.

With Samsung being just behind Intel for the biggest semiconductor firm, this might not come as a surprise for some. The unique space for mining equipment has slowly but surely grown as the market cap and proof-of-work cryptocurrencies have grown too.

The South-Korean conglomerate produced the chips in the latest line of microBT devices, the M20S WhatsMiner, which boasts 68 Terahashes per second with a power efficiency of 48 watts to the Terahash.

As reported by CryptoSlate:

“For reference, the industry-standard ASIC the Bitmain Antminer S9 achieves 13.5 Th/s with a power efficiency of 98 W/Th. The M20S is five times more powerful and half the power consumption at a comparable retail price of $2,450 in Chinese yuan.”

Moving to Blockchain

Back in February, Samsung announced that its new Galaxy S10 smartphone would include support for storing cryptocurrency private keys. Specifically for Ethereum, ERC20 tokens and any other ETH-based collectables.

In more recent months, rumours have surfaced that the firm is developing its own blockchain based on Ethereum which will more than likely result in a token like Facebook Coin, instead it will, of course, be more like ‘Samsung Coin’, sometime over the next few years.