Crypto Biz: The Web3 arms race is upon us, April 14–20, 2022
2022 is shaping up to be the year for Web3. KuCoin, Framework Ventures and CoinDCX have all made a splash in this emerging paradigm. “Web3” used to be an empty industry buzzword that described the next iteration of the internet. In 2022, Web3 is still an annoying buzzword, but at least the blockchain community is trying to assign it real-world utility. This week’s Crypto Biz newsletter features several major funding rounds dedicated to building the Web3 economy. After reading through the stories, you can decide whether we’re actually getting closer to defining Web3. Oh, and remember all....
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CoinDesk's Daniel Cawrey recently visited and toured the facilities at Butterfly Labs, one of the most prominent and written about producers of bitcoin mining technology. In this second part of this series, he reports on the factors involved in the bitcoin mining arms race. Now that Butterfly Labs is shipping ASIC bitcoin miners at a steady pace, their production plus that of Avalon and mining pools like ASICMiner are causing the mining difficulty to go up quite quickly. What this means is that it takes more computational power to complete proof of work algorithms. It means that a race is....
Manufacturers are planning to ship scrypt-based equipment that will speed up mining and reduce the power overhead for the alternative cryptocurrency algorithm. Could this fuel the next cryptocurrency arms race? Most cryptocurrencies that are mined by computers use a 'proof of work' algorithm, designed to make them prove that they have invested the computing power in producing the coins. Bitcoin uses SHA-256, but many alternative coins (altcoins) use another system, called scrypt. One of the biggest differences between scrypt and SHA-256 is that the former relies heavily on computing....
The face of industrial-scale bitcoin mining is changing with every passing month, having already pushed far beyond the bounds once envisioned, perhaps, by the hobby miners of four years ago. The landscape is much different now. Many large-scale mines are shifting from warehouse set-ups to data centers better equipped to deliver the massive power and cooling resources necessary to compete in a steadily accelerating industry. CoinDesk spoke with executives from some of the biggest hardware companies in the mining space. During those discussions a picture emerged of an industry undergoing a....
The bitcoin mining industry has witnessed massive change over the past two years. The technological arms race launched by ASIC makers quickly put an end to GPU and FPGA (field-programmable gate array) mining, but much like the Cold War arms race, additional investments may prove unsustainable in the long run due to ROI constraints. Currently, miners are hitting the wall. Technology is the first problem. Most miners are already using the latest nodes, namely 28nm and 20nm processors offered by TSMC and GlobalFoundries, while the first 14nm/16nm FinFET ASICs are expected next year. Yet....
The Web3 infrastructure race heats up as more providers compete with each other, which indicates a healthy decentralization of the Web3 ecosystem. People interact with open-source applications like MetaMask, Web3 games, the metaverse and DeFi protocols every day but don’t often stop to think about what happens in the background for it all to work. If we think of Web3 as a burgeoning new city, node infrastructure providers are the underlying power grid that makes operations possible.All DApps need to communicate with blockchains, and full nodes serve billions of requests from DApps to read....