Modular Bitcoin Miner Challenging Bitmain’s Dominance

Jack Dorsey’s Block Inc. recently announced the Proto Rig, a modular reinvention of Bitcoin mining hardware not seen since Bitmain’s launch of the S1 ASIC rig in 2013, over 12 years ago. The announcement was made from the facilities of Core Scientific with whom Block has partnered to design, test and develop the Proto line of mining hardware. Dorsey personally attended the event, among a who’s who of the Bitcoin mining industry. 

The Proto Rig has the potential to disrupt and challenge Bitmain’s effective monopoly over mining hardware manufacturing, with approximately over 80% of the market, a position it has enjoyed for most of Bitcoin’s history. But the main innovation does not come from more powerful or energy-efficient chips — not yet anyway — rather from making everything else around the chip drastically better, designed to lower repair frequency and maintenance costs. Its modular design supports seamless upgrades and part replacements that can be swapped in seconds. 

In an interview with The Mining Pod, Perry Hothi, blockchain solutions architect at Block, focused on the mining division since 2022 said the device was more than just competitive with the Bitmain line of mining rigs; “When people hear competitive, they automatically think efficient, right? I always say it’s profitable… If it’s not running, efficiency doesn’t matter.” It changes the focus of the conversation in mining from the specs of ASIC chips toward the amateur design of mining rigs as a whole, which have not yet caught up with best practices developed by the data center industry in its many decades of experience. “When you look at the data center world, they’ve been doing it for 10 times as long [as Bitcoin miners]. There’s a lot of innovations they made that work for us,” Hothi said, implying the Proto Rig was designed to learn from the scaled-up data center industry. 

Erik Cativo, a Bitcoin product developer and HRF grantee echoed this sentiment on X saying the “Proto Rig looks clean. Reminds me of beautifully designed Swedish telecom hardware.”

In the interview, Hothi also discussed the vision and complexities of manufacturing the Proto Rig in the United States, expressing the benefits of manufacturing pieces at home, which can improve reliability of supply chains and is also now strongly incentivized by President Trump’s new tariff regime. On the topic Hothi said, “there are certain components that can be built faster in China and brought over, others are better built in America now… Like there’s a not too distant future where every component in [the Proto Rig] will be built right here [in the United States].” He added that today, “the [ASIC] chips are going to be in Taiwan, but even those eventually, we’re looking to make those here.”

Regarding the ASIC chip of the Proto Rig, Max Guise Product & ASIC Lead at Proto told Bitcoin Magazine “Our system is vertically integrated end-to-end, including our own chip. At a system level, we can offer different configurations that bring different efficiency depending on the mining operator needs, and our configurations go as low as 14.1 joules per hash efficiency rating.” keeping details about the chip close to the chest and emphasizing the Proto Rig’s customizability and modularity. 

Modularity

In order to provide more reliable hashrate to miners, the Proto Rig is designed in modular pieces starting with the chassis, which measures 39cm by 29cm by 50cm and can host nine boards’ worth of chips, six fans and three modular power units. The Proto Rig can be liquid cooled as well, while the modular fans suggest the hardware is meant to be modded or extended to serve different use cases and approaches, perhaps enterprise miners or the booming home mining industry. The Proto Rig is highly customizable allowing miners to choose exactly how many chips to run, while also having clear hardware and software error signals in case a fan breaks or a power supply is overheating. 

The Proto Rig manages to squeeze the equivalent of three mining units in the space of two traditional models while being competitive to top-of-the-line industrial miners like the Bitmain Antminer S21 XP or the MicroBT Whatsminer M66S, both running on about 14 joules per terahash. Yet the Proto Rig delivers up to 810 TH per unit in the same space as the competitors, taking into account the real estate costs of industrial mining, which for years have filled out warehouses of units side by side. 

The Proto Right might not just be built for the big miners. There were multiple hints in the event and following commentary that suggest home miners will get some love as well from the Proto hardware team. Jack Dorsey himself tweeted out “A commitment to ALL the players in the mining industry, not just the big guys.” He retweeted a bitcoiner who attended the event and shared his excitement with some photographs. 

The mysterious tweet has not been followed up with any details but there are rumours that there might be a Bitaxe-style collaboration with Proto which would look to serve the home mining market. 

When asked about home mining Max Guise told Bitcoin Magazine “Proto is designing products for mining operators of all sizes. Our first product, Rig, is a 12 kilowatt system, which is a higher power requirement than most home miners can handle, so it is best suited for operators who have more infrastructure involved in their operations. That doesn’t rule out the possibility of future products that could be more retail-friendly, but right now it’s not our focus.”

StratumV2 On By Default: Huge For Miner Decentralization

Brian Stegall, head of design at Proto, announced at the launch event that the “Proto Rigs will support Stratum V2 out of the box,” adding that, “It’s a more efficient protocol that offers native hashrate auditing, which helps detect and reduce issues like miner misconfiguration, unwanted divergence and other fleet-wide issues.” 

Stratumv2 is a mining pool update to the popular Stratum V1 protocol which dominates adoption among miners, in part because it was one of the first software tools developed to pull hashrate from miners throughout the world, allowing them to act as one miner and share rewards. The old protocol, while well understood by miners has a serious downside, it centralizes the construction of blocks to the mining pool operator, an issue that was recently revealed to be worse than expected, as most mining pools appear to be copying block templates produced by Antpool. The risk threatens a deep layer of the Bitcoin network, potentially exposing transactions to censorship, if this trend is not reversed. 

StratumV2 was designed to put block template production in the hands of hashrate providers, pushing the process to the edges and thus increasing the diversity of blocks and transactions included, ultimately safeguarding Bitcoin’s censorship-resistance properties. 

But mining pools have been slow to adopt the protocol, likely because of the software development lift. With the Proto Rig building it into the software stack of the machine, we should expect a much higher rate of adoption as the Block’s mining rigs get rolled out into production. This is a development that the greater Bitcoin community has been working toward for many years. 

Open Sourcing The Software

Going beyond just reinventing mining hardware, Proto has also announced the open source release of its mining management software, Fleet.

Brian Stegall broke the news by sharing their experience researching the state of software in the Bitcoin mining industry as, “We chatted with a ton of different people in varying sizes of operations, and we listened to all the complaints… We broke that down into three areas… One, that there’s too many tools. Two, making it simple is important. And automation and AI is the third one.”

Fleet consolidates a patchwork of tools used by miners to boot and track their machines as well as identify hardware or software failures. Laughing in playful disbelief Stegall said that “We went to a lot of facilities and there’s a lot of places where they’ll scan the network with BTC.com tools, still. Yeah. Right. And then will flip it into a spreadsheet and upload it.” As an example of how badly a modern software suite is needed, he described some arcane process of big mining.

Stegall also made the case that having a better-designed and robust software tool to manage the hardware would help train employees more effectively and let them focus on more important issues rather than struggle with bad user interfaces.

On the topic of security Stegall said that the “Proto Fleet comes out of the box with secure boot technology to guarantee that the firmware you’re running comes from Proto. This is an extra measure that prevents supply chain attacks, malware attacks, and theft of Bitcoin rewards.” He added that, “It will also allow you to disable secure boot technology easily if you want to do something of your own.”

Finally, the topic of AI was teased out as a modern approach to user experience, though the hints made were somewhat vague: “We wanted to make clean and clear dashboards… If fan3 is broken, we tell you fan3 is broken… We’re providing robust repair guides right in proto-fleet… We want to introduce a modern AI-powered interface… Automated alerts so that you don’t even have to ask the chat interface.”

While details on the depth of AI integration into Fleet are still scarce, what Stegall shared does reveal a vision of high-tech modern software helping increase the efficiency of Bitcoin miners as a whole. 

The software is expected to be open sourced in the near future, though no software has been released to the public yet. 

Pricing and Delivery

Overall, while we have learned much about Block and Proto’s plans to serve and upgrade the Bitcoin mining industry, no details have been shared about the price of the Proto Rigs, on the topic Max Guise told Bitcoin Magazine that “We want to hear from everyone interested in Proto Rig. There are many ways to configure the rig, and pricing and configuration options are handled directly by our Sales team.”

The rigs are starting to hit the market, apparently not just to Core Scientific who has a close partnership with Proto, Max Guise told Bitcoin Magazine that the “Proto Rigs are shipping to customers now. As far as availability, we recommend customers to check with our Sales team on exact availability depending on configuration and volume”.

All and all, the Proto Rig reveal left a strong impression in the mining industry and greater Bitcoin community: It demonstrated a mastery in industrial design and showed off what top Western talent can bring to a hardware industry that for most of Bitcoin’s history has been dominated by the East.