• Monero (XMR) is on a mild rampage as Bitmain has teased its specialized miner.
• The mining rig is next-level technology to create deeper accessibility to Monero.

Popular cryptocurrency mining rig manufacturer Bitmain has hinted at the possible launch of a machine that is solely designed to facilitate the mining of the digital currency Monero (XMR). When this eventually happens, it will be the first professional XMR miner in history. The Antminer X5, as it is called, boasts a hashrate of 212 kilohash per second (KH/s). 

In terms of other specifications, the Antminer X5 consumes as much as 1,350 watts from the power source and it has an efficiency rating of 6.37 joules per Kilohash. Some statistics have shown that Monero’s total network hashrate is hovering around 2.06 gigahash per second (GH/s), which is equivalent to 2.06 million KH/s 

Based on an announcement on the X platform, proposed sales will commence on September 4th while shopping will not be until September 10th. No official price for the machine has been announced, instead, netizens were asked to make speculations with prizes attached to answers within the range of the actual value. 

If a predicted price estimate falls within 5% of the true value, the respondents will receive a $1,000 Bitmain coupon, and those within 10% will be rewarded with a $500 coupon.

Mixed Reactions Over The Monero ASIC Antminer X5 

The news of the Monero mining machine has met with mixed reactions from the privacy-inclined XMR crypto community. As seen on the r/monero Reddit forum, XMR miners are concerned about the development of Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) for mining the privacy coin. Generally, ASIC miners are specially designed hardware that makes the mining of crypto more efficient than when general-purpose hardware like Central Processing Units (CPUs) and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are used.

As a cryptocurrency recognized for its privacy, XMR has consistently pursued resistance against ASICs over the years. There are concerns that could translate to the centralization of mining power in the hands of a few large mining operations. Four years ago, the Monero network went through a hard fork to implement a new mining algorithm called RandomX. 

Markedly, this consensus algorithm was designed to be ASICs-resistant and improve accessibility to the mining process. This makes it difficult to mine XMR efficiently with ASICs.

Still, it has been discovered that achieving complete ASICs resistance is difficult especially as ASIC manufacturers are constantly coming up with new models. With the new Antminer X5, it looks like Bitmain has cracked the problem and figured out a way to develop ASICs that can mine XMR using RandomX.

In the past 24 hours, Monero price has seen a 1.26% surge and the altczZZoin is currently trading at $145.58. Over the past month, the token has experienced a total price decline of 10% but the news about the Antminer X5 may push the price to $160 levels amidst other favourable metrics in the short to medium term.