Block, Inc. is leading the charge in Bitcoin mining revolution with its latest announcement of a “Mining Development Kit (MDK)”. The company believes that it and developers can work to build better Bitcoin rigs through the use of the MDK. It would serve as a do-it-yourself kit that would pave the way for innovation in Bitcoin mining hardware.
The MDK kit is set to include basic components of a Bitcoin mining rig, including a hashboard, controller board, open-source firmware, software, and lots of documentation. In Block’s announcement, Naoise Irwin, Block Mining Hardware Senior Product Lead, said the MDK would be useful in developing projects to integrate Bitcoin mining into various novel use cases such as home mining and off-grid mining. He also mentioned its potential usefulness in “optimization of Bitcoin mining hardware for traditional commercial mining operations”.
Last year, Block, Inc. took a step further into the Bitcoin mining sector by contributing $5 million to a joint venture with Tesla and Blockstream to pilot an all-solar Bitcoin mining facility in Texas. More recently, the company also revealed its plans to design its own Bitcoin mining semiconductor chips – commonly referred to as ASICs.
If that wasn’t enough, Block also takes significant initiatives to invest in the Bitcoin ecosystem. It has made significant contributions to open source projects through its independent team Spiral, the decentralized finance development platform TBD, as well as its self-custody wallet.
The company is optimistic that its efforts will help address inefficiencies in the current financial system, especially with respect to identity and trust. Its ambitions may have made a 21% gain since the start of this year, however, investors have yet to be fully convinced as they have seen the company’s shares trading at $78.04, down 3% for the day.
But despite the downturn of the crypto markets, Blockstream, who has notably worked with Block, is still pushing forward with its fundraising. The crypto infrastructure firm is looking to raise funds at a much lower valuation than its last funding round, valued at $3.2 billion in 2021. Bloomberg reported that today that valuation may have fallen almost 70% to below $1 billion.
Blockstream CEO and cryptographer Adam Back noted that this capital will be invested into expanding the firm’s mining capacity. The series B funding round brought in $210 million and over four rounds, the firm has currently raised $299 million.
But miners are suffering from a triple-whammy of high hash rates, energy prices, and low BTC prices. That’s why the Blockstream monthly newsletter in December 5th revealed that its Blockstream Mining Note (BMN) token has earned around 5.37 BTC cumulatively in returns nearly halfway into its three-year term.
With the increasing competition in the Bitcoin mining industry, the MDK and the larger Bitcoin mining projects being developed by Block, Inc. and Blockstream look to be a promising but risky move. If the projects can effectively bring down the costs of mining and make it more widely available, it will be a major boon for the industry as a whole. We’ll have to keep an eye out for more announcements in the coming weeks and months for more details on the revolutionary projects Block and Blockstream are working on.
