Jack Dorsey’s payments company Block is building its own Bitcoin mining system

Jack Dorsey said his payment company to block (formerly Square) is expanding Bitcoin Mining ambitions range from designing chips to building complete Bitcoin mining systems.

The PostGlobal technology company on Tuesday announced that it has completed manufacturing its own three-nanometer bitcoin mining chip and is currently working on the design with “the world’s leading semiconductor foundry”.

Block also unveiled plans to expand the scope of its mining projects to include systems design.

“We spent a significant amount of time talking to various Bitcoin miners to identify the challenges mining operators face,” Block wrote “Based on these insights, and in line with our mission to support mining decentralization. Independent mining chip and complete mining system designed by us.

The democratization of bitcoin mining – the process of creating new bitcoins by solving increasingly complex computational problems – is an important part of the project’s mission statement.

When Block first entered the mining hardware industry in 2021, Dorsey wrote: “Bitcoin mining shouldn’t be as easy as running a mine yourself to overcome the complexity of your device.”

In fact, members of the Bitcoin community have long worried that hardware vulnerabilities could harm the stability of the network. For example, ASIC chips used in mining equipment are manufactured in China, which has been hostile to the crypto industry in recent years.

The project aims to decentralize the supply of bitcoin mining hardware and the distribution of computing power (a proxy for industry competition and mining difficulty), Block said in a memo on Tuesday.

To do this, fintech companies are solving a major barrier to entry: mining equipment is difficult and expensive to find, and delivery can be unpredictable.

The company did not reveal details in its latest announcement, however https://twitter.com/jack/status/1449110239442345995?s=20 The company is considering a “custom chip-based bitcoin mining system”. At the time, Dorsey shared his thoughts on vertical integration and the need to focus more on chip design, which he believed was too concentrated in a small number of companies.

Thomas Templeton, Block’s general manager of hardware, previously revealed plans to improve mining reliability and user experience, addressing common issues with heat dissipation and noise generation.

The announcement comes in the wake of the recent bitcoin halving, effective later Friday. This event occurs approximately every four years and cuts the issuance of new bitcoins in half.

The idea of ​​simplifying the mining process is not just to generate new bitcoins. Instead, Dorsey sees it as a long-term need for a fully decentralized and permissionless future.

“Mining needs to be more decentralized,” Dorsey posted on X in October. When he first came up with the idea. “The more decentralized it is, the more resilient the Bitcoin network will be.”

To this end, Block’s venture capital arm is backing Gridless, a company that operates renewable energy bitcoin mining farms in Kenya, Malawi and Zambia.