Over the weekend, the start-up Obelisk Miner announced that it intends to cancel the production of the expected ASICs for Grin mining.
Announced last February 2019, the company planned to bring to market at least three models of ASIC for mining Grin. The line-up should have been made up of the top-of-the-range device – the Obelisk GRN1 Immersion – with a hashrate of 840 GPS and a power consumption of 4400 Watts, an intermediate version of 420 GPS, and an entry-level version of just over 70 GPS, with a power consumption of 400 Watts per hour.
Prices had already been announced, as Obelisk had already collected some pre-orders in the first months of the year. The actual availability of the products, however, was set for October 2019, at a final price of 20 thousand, 10 thousand and 2 thousand dollars depending on the variant.Â
However, it seems that these products will never reach the market, as Obelisk has completely cancelled the GRN1 miner project, due to the very few pre-orders received and the lack of general interest among communities in the recent period.
The only Grin mining ASICs, therefore, will remain those produced by Innosilicon, which should be made available in the coming months.
Obelisk cancels production of ASICs for Grin mining
As stated in the official press release, all those who pre-ordered Obelisk’s ASICs for the mining of Grin will be reimbursed. Refunds will be processed in bitcoin. An amount equivalent to the amount of dollars paid during pre-orders will be distributed.
As explained by the company, the project was cancelled due to the lack of interest. The very high costs of designing, developing and producing an ASIC to mine Grin have led the company to face several barriers and economic difficulties. In addition to these obstacles, there is the mechanism of dividing the reward for each correctly mined block, which has imposed some time limits on the company.
The reward per block is divided into three ways: a part goes to miners equipped with GPUs, a part goes to the Cucaktoo31 algorithm with low memory requirements, and the rest to the Cuckatoo32 algorithm with higher memory requirements.
This division, combined with the fact that Grin has not yet achieved a substantial upward trend in the cryptocurrency market, has proved to be an insurmountable barrier for the company. Among the three algorithms, in fact, Obelisk has chosen to focus on Cuckatoo31, with the intention of creating a second generation of ASICs to also mine the algorithm Cuckatoo32.
The company believed that such an approach would give it a significant roadmap advantage over its competitors. However, Obelisk was unable to meet the deadlines set, which is why it was forced to abort the entire project.
It is not clear whether the company will propose new ASICs for Grin mining in the future, although the words in the press release seemed quite clear, suggesting that the company will abandon the project for an unspecified period of time.
