Block, the financial services and technology company owned by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, has announced it has completed the prototype design of its new five-nanometre (5nm) Bitcoin (BTC) mining chip — which it claims is key to decentralizing the supply of Bitcoin mining rigs.
According to a blog post published on April 28, Block explained that developing Bitcoin mining ASIC rigs is both financially and technically challenging. The result of this has been “the excessive concentration of custom bitcoin mining silicon” in the hands of a select few companies. Block deems this centralization harmful to both miners and the Bitcoin network as a whole.