Decred (DCR) Gets Dedicated ASIC Rig from Bitmain

Decred (DCR), one of the coins greeting the increase in ASIC mining, now has a dedicated mining rig in the shape of Bitmain’s recently announced Antminer D3:

https://twitter.com/Antminer_main/status/1043844217288699904

Despite Bitmain’s troubles, the Antminer series has expanded with rigs dedicated to prominent altcoins that previously relied on GPU mining.

Decred is a two-tier digital asset, relying on nodes that additionally verify the network, so a 51% attack through mining alone is not possible, and an attack on the network would be prohibitively expensive. With more ASIC, however, the mining component will become even more difficult to overtake.

DCR is a relatively unpopular asset, at least for now, and is mostly supported by Korean trading. After the news, it appreciated only slightly, gaining around 1.11% in 24 hours to climb to $38.63. DCR, whose prices are attempting to recover from their lows, sees inconsistent volumes with low-level trading on most days.

However, Antminer’s announcement has raised doubts that the rigs had been in operation for months and are now close to unprofitable to use. Bitmain, the producer of the rigs, has been previously accused of running the machines for a few months before selling them.

The hashrate for Decred started expanding significantly this summer, rising from around 3,700 TH/s in May to as high as 85,000 TH/s. Such rapid growth is always suspected to be the result of ASIC mining the chain in secret rather than amateur miners or pools with GPU. Given the friendly attitude of the Decred team to the ASIC, it is possible that some ASIC mining has already occurred. Decred uses the Blake 256 algorithm and is among the popular coins for cloud mining.

For Decred, mining is just one part of the network activity. The project has high expectations for its Politeia voting system, which would manage, among other things, the Decred developer fund that holds about 500,000 DCR coins.

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