Bitmain’s Antminer E3 To Continue Mining Ether After New Update

While some cryptocurrency miners are stalling operations due to unprofitability, Chinese mining giant Bitmain continues to not only sell its new machines but also upgrading some of its older flagship ones such as Antminer E3 designed for mining Ether.

Bitmain’s Antminer E3, a popular ASIC miner was expected to become obsolete by April 2020, will continue mining Ether (ETH) at least till October 2020.

Bitmain earlier confirmed that Antminer E3 would stop mining Ether

In a March 30 blog post Bitmain said that Antminer E3’s lifespan is prolonged with specifically designed firmware. The post details that the new firmware was created to let miners continue running Antminer E3 “even after March 2020.”

Antminer E3’s new firmware solves an issue with direct acyclic graph (DAG) files, which was initially unveiled by altcoin mining pool 2Miners in February 2020. According to 2Miners, DAG growth was the key reason for limiting the capability of Antminer E3’s for mining Ether and Ethereum Classic (ETC) due to limited memory capacity.

While Bitmain later confirmed the DAG growth issue, stating that its double date rate (DDR) memory was close to its 4GB limit, 2Miners estimated that Antminer E3 would stop mining Ether on April 8, 2020.

Bitmain’s firmware addresses DAG growth issue directly

However, now Antminer E3’s lifespan was extended with the new firmware which resolves the DAG problem directly. Bitmain states that the new firmware will expand the usage of DDR memory, as more space is required to process DAG files.

With the new firmware update, the final approximate block height for the Antminer E3 is 11,400,000, according to the blog post. While Bitmain believes that E3 miners will operate after April 2020, the miner will still work until October 2020, the company calculated.

Launched by Bitmain in April 2018, Antminer E3 was praised as the “world’s most powerful and efficient EtHash ASIC miner.” Ethash is the Proof-of-Work (PoW) hashing algorithm used by Ethereum and some other altcoins like ETC. In the meantime, the Ethereum network is about to move from PoW to Proof-of-Stake consensus.