It has been a rough couple of months for GPU miners as profitability continues to drop off due to increasing difficulty and decreasing coin price. However, for one particular subset of miners, things are about to get a whole lot worse.

In a recent announcement, China-based crypto miner creator Baikal unveiled a brand new ASIC miner that can supposedly mine coins that utilize the CryptoNight consensus algorithm at a hash rate of 20 KH/s and a power consumption of only 60W. If these specs are accurate, the Baikal Grant N stands to have a detrimental impact on the global hash rates across multiple CryptoNight coins, which were initially designed to be resistant to classic ASIC miners.

Coins At Risk

CryptoNight coins are some of the more popular coins available to miners, with coins like Monero, Electroneum and Sumokoin. The majority of these projects have already identified the Baikal problem, and are being proactive with their preparation for its launch.

And the fun continues, the so called 60 Watt Cryptonight Asic Miner has an output of 20 KH/s, the current global hashrate of #Monero is 955 MH/s

So it would need on about 50,000 asics mining ONLY #Monero just to double the hashrate which would mean 300M usd profit for Baikal. BS — Sumokoin Community (@Sumokoin_tweet) March 11, 2018

Monero leadership recently stated, “We strongly believe that it’s beneficial to preserve our ASIC resistance. Therefore, we will perform an emergency hard fork to curb any potential threat from ASICs if needed.”

The Sumokoin team said the following on Twitter, “there will be no knee-jerk reactions from our side regarding the ‘announced’ ASIC. If there is an issue we will fork asap but till then we are not risking any forks till the first solid evidence on our network’s hashrate.”

Final Take

If the Baikal miner is legitimate, CryptoNight projects need to continue to prevent the additional hash rate from flooding their networks.

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Disclaimer: The author(s) of this article may have a position in one or more of the securities mentioned above. This article is for informational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice. Always conduct your own due diligence before making investments.