What to know:

Application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chips form the backbone of the bitcoin (BTC) mining industry. ASIC machines are made for a single purpose: To solve Bitcoin’s SHA-256 algorithm as fast as possible in order to collect block rewards.

They’re extremely good at it. One of the most widely used ASIC machines, the Antminer S19, is capable of making 82 trillion computations per second — 820 times the number of stars in the Milky Way. The $30 billion ASIC manufacturing market is dominated by Bitmain. The Chinese company’s machines power roughly 80% of Bitcoin’s hashrate, according to TheMinerMag.

But Singapore-based bitcoin mining firm Bitdeer (BTDR) intends to shake things up with the release of a new ASIC chip architecture. These new chips could bring a huge jump in efficiency, the company claims, while improving transparency in the ASIC manufacturing process.

“The two dominant players [Bitmain and MicroBT] are both private companies, and very opaque,” Jeff LaBerge, head of capital markets and strategic initiatives at Bitdeer, told CoinDesk in an interview. “They don’t really engage with the media or give any type of guidance about what they’re doing from an R&D standpoint, and that makes it very difficult for end-buyers to plan.”

“We want our customers to know where we’re at in our manufacturing process, what our roadmap is in terms of new chip designs, where we’re at in our production cycles,” LaBerge said.

Shanon Squires, chief mining officer at bitcoin hosting firm Compass Mining, told CoinDesk that increased visibility into ASIC production would help miners plan new hardware shipments and make it easier to predict Bitcoin’s difficulty growth. “Bitdeer’s commitment to transparency is great for the mining industry,” he said.

“While Canaan discloses its annual sales volume for various mining models, Bitdeer takes it a step further by providing more frequent delivery volume updates,” Wolfie Zhao, head of research at TheMinerMag, told CoinDesk. “Although both are smaller players in the hardware market, their efforts show good faith in promoting transparency. Hopefully, this will encourage the larger market incumbents to take note.”

Seeking efficiency

ASIC chips have used mostly the same blueprint since 2014. Over the last decade, the biggest increases in ASIC power efficiency have come at the foundry level, as leading global chipmaker TSMC has refined its manufacturing process. While miners have also made alterations to chip design, such modifications have only brought incremental gains.