This New ASIC Miner Could Pose a Major Risk to CryptoNight Miners
The newly announced Baikal Grant N ASIC miner threatens most CryptoNight-based coins.
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.
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.”